The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy 9781442681446

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THE HISTORIC IMAGINARY Politics of History in Fascist Italy

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THE HISTORIC IMAGINARY Politics of History in Fascist Italy

Claudio Fogu

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2003 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-8764-7

Printed on acid-free paper Toronto Italian Studies

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Fogu, Claudio, 1963– The historic imaginary : politics of history in fascist Italy / Claudio Fogu. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8020-8764-7 1. Fascism and culture – Italy – History – 20th century. 2. Fascism – Italy – History – 20th century. I. Title. dg571.f63 2003

945.091

c2003-900675-1

This book has been published with the assistance of a grant from the University of Southern California. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments Introduction

xi 3

1 History Belongs to the Present 2 Il Duce Taumaturgo 3 Historic Spectacle

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52 72

4 The Historic Imaginary and the Mass Media 5 The Contest of Exhibitions 6 Fascist Historic Culture Epilogue

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Notes

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Index

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114 165

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1 The central hall in the Milanese Museum of Risorgimento in 1926. 67 2 Floor map of the Milanese Museo del Risorgimento in 1926.

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3 Antoni Sciortino, Anita, 1928. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 78 4 Mario Rutelli’s plaster cast of Anita (1928). Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 80 5 Mario Rutelli, Anita, 1932.

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6 The parade accompanying Anita Garibaldi to Genoa’s central train station on 2 June 1932. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 87 7 The parade passing through the Arco in onore dei caduti in Genoa. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 89 8 Map with the instruction for the formation of the parade in Rome on 4 June 1932. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 92 9 The parade passing through Via Nazionale in Rome. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 93 10 Floor map of the Mostra garibaldina, Rome, 1932.

123

11 Room 1 in the Mostra garibaldina. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 124

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Illustrations

12 Room 20 in the Mostra garibaldina. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 125 13 Room 24 in the Mostra garibaldina. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 126 14 The Gallery of Uniforms in the Mostra garibaldina, Rome, 1932. Courtesy of the Associazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, Rome. 128 15 The facade of the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, Rome, 1932. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 136 16 Ground floor map of the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 137 17 Room A in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 140 18 Room C in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 142 19 Room E in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 144 20 Room E in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista: particular of the back wall. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 146 21 Room O in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 148 22 Room O in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista: particular of the photomontage Adunate by Giuseppe Terragni. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 149 23 Room P in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 151 24 Room R, the Hall of Honour, in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 153 25 Room T, the Mussolini Hall, in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 155 26 Reconstruction of Mussolini’s last office at Il Popolo d’Italia, in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 156

Illustrations

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27 Room U, the Shrine of the Martyrs, in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 158 28 Room S, the Gallery of Fasces, in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 159 29 Return view of the Hall of Mussolini from the Gallery of Fasces in the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Courtesy of the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome. 161 30 André Masson, Acéphale, 1932.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To all of my friends, on both sides of the Atlantic, I owe a collective debt of gratitude. Without your constant encouragement and reminders that there is more to life than completing a manuscript, paradoxically this book would never have seen the light of day. Some of you, of course, have also greatly contributed to its conceptualization, writing, and endless revisions. Primi inter pares are my fellow musketeers from my graduate school years at UCLA: Kerwin Klein, Michael Wintroub, and, above all, Wulf Kansteiner, the best of friends and my primary intellectual partner. We all lived through glorious intellectual times and imagined together a brave new world of scholarly breakthroughs. I hope you will find in this book some of that enthusiasm we shared, and, I hope, so will my friends and mentors at UCLA – Robert Wohl, Lucia Re, Saul Friedlander, Carlo Ginzburg, and Perry Anderson. I cannot thank you enough for having refrained from curbing my enthusiasm even when it went against your convictions and better judgment. Along these lines, a very special thank you I reserve for Sande Cohen, Sam Weber, and Hayden White, whose critical readings of my writings have helped sharpen my theoretical constructs, and in the process made me a better historian. Another grazie goes to my closest associates in the study of Italian fascism: Luisa Passerini, Massimo Baioni, Giovanni Belardelli, Kriss Ravetto, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Jeffrey Schnapp. I trust each of you will find in this book an echo of our many conversations and your specific contributions to my thinking. Finally, this book would have never been completed without the contribution of several institutions that either financed my research or opened their archives to me. Included among the former are the Wolfsonian Foundation in Miami, Florida, the Shumann Center at the Euro-

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pean University Institute in Florence, Italy, the Mershon Center at Ohio State University, Columbus, and the College of Letters Arts and Sciences (LAS) at the University of Southern California. Among the latter are the Archivio centrale di stato, the Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea (BSMC), the Istituto nazionale del Risorgimento, the Archivio della federazione nazionale volontari garibaldini, and the private archive of Cesare Maria De Vecchi in Rome. To the directors and personnel of these institutions I owe all my gratitude, and in particular, I thank Erika and Giuseppe Garibaldi, Paolo De Vecchi, Marianne Lamonica, Richard Ned Lebow, and all the librarians at the BSMC. And to those who helped me chart my own history, my family, I thank you.

THE HISTORIC IMAGINARY Politics of History in Fascist Italy

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INTRODUCTION

My dear Raymond, I am writing from the fascist exhibition itself because there are comfortable tables to write: hence the idea of writing to you. The exhibition is filled everywhere with black flags with embroidered skulls, especially in the shrine of the dead. One of these flags figures in the reconstruction of Mussolini’s squalid study in Milan. I am quite astonished. I didn’t know this history. I am even startled. It won’t evidently lead me to buy a shining croix du feu, nor will it change me a bit, but the effect is very strong. Georges Bataille, 19341

With these words, addressed to his comrade-friend Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille reported on the spot his very strong impression of the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (MRF) (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution), a historical exhibition set up in Rome between 1932 and 1934 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome. This was Bataille’s first visit to fascist Italy. A few months earlier he had published his seminal essay ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism.’2 In it he had developed a theory of the fascist phenomenon as the subordination of homogeneous social relations to heterogeneous ones – that is, of the cohesive rule of law and economic structures to the flexible world of sacred bonds, psychological ties, ‘unproductive expenditure,’ and ‘excess.’3 The essay was the result of two years of intensive reading and was aimed at providing a general theory of fascism that extended also to Nazism.4 Why then would Bataille be so astonished by the historical exhibition of a phenomenon he had just theorized? Could this exhibition have

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The Historic Imaginary

caused Bataille to waver in his theoretical assessment of the common heterogeneous core of Italian Fascism and Nazism? Set up by a team of journalists, historians, and thirty-four of Italy’s best-known artists, the MRF – the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution – constituted a ‘modernist Gesamtkunstwerk’ of exceptional artistic quality, which also managed to attract over three and a half million visitors.5 In 1934 fascist Rome avant-garde aesthetics and mass culture seemed to have found a point of intersection that had no rivals either in the Soviet Union or in the Western democracies, and that could not have been more distant from Nazi Germany, where modernist masterpieces had begun to be removed from German art museums and Hitler’s speeches insisted on the antithetical relationship between Nazism and ‘degenerate’ modern art.6 Quite plausibly, then, the aesthetic avant-gardism of this exhibition could not have failed to impress an attentive observer and surrealist sympathizer like Bataille. In fact, recent scholarship and exhibitions of art and design under fascism may have begun accounting for Bataille’s reaction by documenting how the enduring marriage between avant-garde aesthetics and fascist image politics differentiated the Italian fascist regime from the Nazi one precisely in the area of unproductive aesthetic expenditure and excess.7 Everything, from the personal preferences of the two dictators, to their policy statements, to the political histories of the avant-gardes in Italy and Germany, conspired to create two parallel paths. Whereas the amateur painter Adolf Hitler used his power, speeches, and financial resources to first denounce all forms of ‘degenerate’ avant-garde arts and then identify Nazi art with a state-approved, vaguely defined ‘Germanic style,’ the ex-journalist and futurist sympathizer Mussolini sought actively to endorse the talent of avant-garde artists for the cause of fascism, and he never gave in to reactionary demands to sanction an official art form of the fascist state.8 And, although recent scholarship has also revised an all too monolithic view of Nazi art,9 and – on the Italian side – highlighted the thematic nazification of fascist culture in the second half of the 1930s,10 the idea of a fascist form of modernism has been supported by recent research on both the cultural origins of Italian fascist ideology and the cultural politics of the regime. Today most scholars agree that fascist anti-ideological discourse was itself a most powerful form of ideology, that fascism’s lack of a doctrinal core was amply compensated for by a rhetoric that deployed culturally available language, and that this cultural language was primarily that of French-Italian modernist thought.11 In particular, fascist rhetoric coa-

Introduction

5

lesced and anchored itself around two modernist poles of ideological structuring: the rhetorics of virility ushered in by futurism,12 and the antimaterialist revision of Marxism practised by George Sorel and revolutionary syndicalism,13 with the vociani – the Florentine avant-garde united in La Voce – providing fascism with the rhetorical glue to unite nationalism and modernism.14 The fascist claim to be ‘neither left nor right’ was therefore intellectually grounded in that common search for new secular-religious values that characterized the whole spectrum of Italian modernist culture.15 Translated into ritual- and image-politics, this claim meant that fascism pursued a unique balance between modernist aestheticization and popular-cultural sacralization of politics. In fact, above all, fascist modernism came to challenge the double ‘Great Divide’ (to use Andreas Huyssen’s fertile image) that most historians, theoreticians, and critics of ‘modernism’ have traditionally posited between ‘high’ modernism and ‘low’ mass culture and – within modernism – between modernist and avant-garde attitudes.16 Although the term modernism was first used as a positive aesthetic connotation in the Romance language-speaking world around the last decade of the nineteenth century (as in modernisme and modernismo), the critical notion of modernism was developed mainly from an AngloGerman perspective. In most English-speaking literature modernism refers to the ‘art for art’s sake’ attitude that marked the beginning of the symbolist movement in poetry, and expanded to embrace all those high-cultural practices that emphasized the self-referential, ironic, and experimental role of art and rejected its mimetic and representational function and, often, even its ethical ends.17 Thus defined, the modernist sensitivity has been identified, on the one hand, with high art’s resistance to any contamination by mass culture and entertainment, and, on the other, with an insistance on the Kantian autonomy of the work of art against the aestheticization of life and the appropriation of mass cultural elements pursued by modernism’s other/double, the avant-garde. As Walter Adamson has recently argued, the theoretical hold of this double distinction has been amazingly resilient.18 Yet this resilience might not be due solely to the canonical status of influential theories such as Theodor Adorno’s, Clement Greenberg’s, and Peter Burger’s.19 Equally significant may have been the subaltern position of Spanish and Italian artists, intellectuals, and movements in the theoretical and historical characterization of a cultural sensibility (modernism) to which they were probably the first to give a name and even a theory.20 From the early 1900s aesthetic avant-gardism and intellectual modern-

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The Historic Imaginary

ism in Italy grew in relation to Catholic modernismo, the early twentiethcentury movement for the reconciliation of Catholic religion and modernity. Cultural modernists shared with Catholic modernisti a drive toward spiritual regeneration, mysticism, and a sense of mission, as well as the heretical goal of reaching out directly, as the high priests of a new aesthetic religion, to the Italian masses.21 Thus, the modernist attitude of the vociani merged an ‘art for art’s sake’ orientation with the idea of organizing a proper ‘party’ of modern artists and intellectuals.22 By the same token, Milanese futurism did not merely appropriate mass culture techniques to aestheticize life; it was also the first avant-garde movement to respond aggressively to mass culture, seeking to transform it completely.23 It was this mass culture spirit, rather than its aestheticist prewar premises, that survived in so-called second generation futurism and led to its political endorsement of fascism as well as its diversification and maximum expansion in the 1920s and 1930s.24 Hence, sustained by Mussolini’s ‘aesthetic politics’25 and the ‘lyrical’ oxymorons that characterized fascist ideological discourse,26 the interaction between the institutionalization of fascist image-politics and avant-garde aesthetic principles continued throughout the ventennio (the two decades of fascist power from 1922 to 1943). Fascist modernism, therefore, differed not only in size and temporal extension from the ‘reactionary modernism’ that characterized Nazi culture, but also in scope and kind.27 The modernist character of fascism resided neither in the ‘spiritualization of technology,’ nor solely in its appropriation of avant-garde techniques, but rather in its self-presentation as a modernist political movement for the age of mass politics.28 Implicitly, then, recent studies of Italian fascism have addressed Bataille’s puzzlement before the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution by highlighting the peculiar blend of modernist rhetorics and avant-garde aesthetics that distinguished fascist image-politics from the racial utopia relentlessly projected by its totalitarian rival and future ally. But what about the fact that Bataille connected his ‘astonishment’ specifically to a ‘history’ he ignored? What did Bataille mean by ‘history’? The res gestae of fascist violence and defiance of death symbolized by the skull exhibited in the reconstructed study of Mussolini? Or the historia rerum gestarum staged throughout the fascist exhibition? Stimulated by these questions, and informed by the recent cultural turn in the study of fascism, my research has focused on the fascist politics of history in 1920s and 1930s Italy in order to show the centrality of this field of cultural production to the formation and evolution of a

Introduction

7

fascist-modernist mass culture. By politics of history I mean both the vision of the relationship between historical agency, representation, and consciousness elaborated by fascist ideologists, and its institutionalization into mental, discursive, and visual images designed for mass consumption. This double focus has set my research path on a tightrope between history and theory, between intellectual and cultural history, and between the close reading of philosophical texts and the ‘thick’ analysis of cultural artefacts. Uniting these directions of research, however, has been the commitment to look for the poetics of history underlying fascist ideology, that is, the deep rhetorical structure that connected the fascist producers of ideological images to those who institutionalized them into visual artefacts and to the Italian audiences who received them. I have thus examined discursive statements by Mussolini and prominent fascist ideologues in search of a vision of history that could be defined and classified theoretically as properly fascist, while simultaneously looking closely at visual and ritual representations of history in search of signs of its institutionalization. In the end, the answers have come from the intersection of these two directions of research. In the book, however, the two research paths are presented sequentially. In Chapter 1 I offer a close reading, genealogical analysis, and theoretical definition of the fascist vision of history. Chapters 2 to 6 focus on the means by which this vision was institutionalized, the key images around which the fascist politics of history organized themselves, and the central events-moments in their evolution. The reader interested in a smooth narrative account, periodization, and social-political contextualization of the fascist politics of history might not be entirely satisfied either by my approach to the evidence or the results of my analysis. On the one hand I privilege a conjectural paradigm of investigation based on clues leading to identify structural, unconscious, or simply submerged levels of historical agency. On the other hand, my analysis stays anchored to a conjunctural context of reference that frustrates any recourse to the explanatory power of narrative. In addition, the structure of the book is closer to a sociological study, with a theoretical hypothesis fully elaborated in the first chapter and verified empirically in the following ones, than a standard historical monograph with a thesis-interpretation developed through the alternation of narrative and analysis. Inevitably some readers will object to the shifts in analytic focus and narrative pace between the chapters, or, more generally, to the theoretical bent of the first and last chapters and the microhistorical bent of the others. However, I would like to remind

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The Historic Imaginary

the reader from the outset that the topic of this research – the politics of history – required a self-reflexive posture that other historians may avoid in researching other subjects. There is no question that the study of any aspect of historical cultures – whether the philosophy of history, historiography, or the public use of history – calls the historian to a continuous and active engagement with the philosophical, epistemological, and methodological underpinnings of his or her own research and writing practices. Not one of the least challenges and pleasures in this process for the historian of history lies in paying great attention to the formal organization of his/her text. Both the analytic structure and narrative organization of this book respond, therefore, to my desire to show the fruitful interaction between history and theory at all levels of the historian’s craft. First, of course, at the level of the subject, I show the ways in which philosophical conceptions of history and historical representations, either professional or designed for a mass audience, may share fundamental characteristics. Second, at the level of the analysis, I use theoretical tools developed in a variety of disciplines – literary and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, art history, and iconology – to read closely the organization, performance, and reception of historical representations. Last but not least, in my conclusions, I invite the reader to reflect upon the results of my historical analysis from the point of view of the speculative philosophy of history. My sincere hope is that even readers who are in principle hostile to these premises may find in the empirical level of my analysis sufficient reason to read the book until the end and evaluate it on the basis of the answers it offers to the questions raised at the beginning. The first answer this study offers to Bataille’s puzzlement before the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution is that this exhibition staged no mere aesthetization of fascist res gestae. Rather, it revealed that Italian fascism had coalesced around a modernist vision of the relationships between historical agency, representation, and consciousness that was aimed at undermining both liberal-positivist and Marxist-materialist philosophies of history, and was also distinct from the racial paradigm dominating all aspects of the Nazi vision of history.29 As George Mosse has argued, Nazism subscribed to an apocalyptic view of history in which German ‘history overcame itself’ in the eschatological projection of the Third Reich.30 Dominated by the utopia of the Reich, both present and past were superseded by visions of the future. Whether in literature, speeches, or doctrinal treaties, the Reich was posited at one and the

Introduction

9

same time as the fulfilment of the Germanic spirit, as immanent in all of German history, and as the dawn of the end of time.31 In practice, however, Nazi politics of history were dominated by a combination of opportunism, moralistic commentary, and racism that allowed the appropriation of any part of the German past for eternal values’ sake. Whether in academic historiography, education, monuments, films, commemorative ceremonies, or other public sites of memory, the panorama offered by Nazi politics of history was remarkably consistent and monochromatic.32 Nazis, Rudy Koshar writes, ‘portrayed themselves not as proactive or even revolutionaries, but as simple, loyal stewards of a racial destiny’ that was not even exclusively national.33 In fact, in Nazi art, appropriation extended to any Aryan past that could be eternalized – ancient classical Greece above all – even at the cost of rejecting parts of the German past, such as the Gothic age and style.34 Nothing could have been further away in both theory and practice from the politics of history pursued by Italian fascism throughout the ventennio and, in particular, from the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. It was not so much that fascist historiography and discourse were free of either racial or eschatological overtones. The obsessive identification of the fascist regime with the Roman imperial past in the 1930s increased with the barbarous invasion of Ethiopia (1935) and was accompanied by a dramatic surge in racist and anti-Semitic discourse.35 On the other hand, as Piergiorgio Zunino clarifies, the selective appropriation of fascist precursors and the repeated affirmations of the fundamental unity of Italian history never quelched the ‘necessity to insert fascism in an eschatological dimension,’ in which ‘neither the past nor the present furnished sufficient justifications for the regime.’ With every new project, phase, or goal, Zunino writes, came corresponding calls for a ‘second wave,’ a ‘third time,’ or a new challenge.36 Yet all this pertained primarily to the realm of discourse – that is, to publications that encompassed historical scholarship and popularization, conferences, newspaper and journals and from which most Italians came to know about the unified historical course of their national history.37 In the visual mass representation of history, fascism instead gave cultural sway to one of its most popular mottoes: Il fascismo fa la storia, non la scrive (Fascism makes history, it does not write it). Predicated on this polarization of ‘making’ versus ‘writing’ history, the MRF had given visual form to a uniquely historic vision of history. I define this vision as ‘historic’ because it mobilized and reified the

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The Historic Imaginary

discursive distinction between the popular-cultural notion of historicness – referring to epoch-making events belonging to the transtemporal presence of consciousness – and that of historical-ness – referring to facts belonging to the past – by appropriating the former and rejecting the latter.38 Specifically, fascism transfigured the idea of historic eventfulness into the mental image of fascist historic agency. That is, it conceived and presented itself as a historic agent whose acts possessed the qualities of immediacy and unmediated signification we commonly attribute to historic events. Just like a historic event, the fascist act of representation was aimed at giving presence to the past in the mind of the observer, thereby eliding the medium of narrative between historical agency and consciousness. In fact, fascism celebrated its historicness by institutionalizing a historic mode of representation at all levels of visual and ritual mass culture. If Bataille’s amazement before the MRF may be plausibly connected to its avant-garde visualization of fascist historic agency, this book also shows that this exhibition was no isolated cultural event. The MRF was a key moment in the process of the consolidation of a fascist historic culture, which had started in the mid-1920s and would last throughout the 1930s. This cultural project was not limited to avant-garde exhibitions such as the MRF, but encompassed all traditional sites of history, from museums and archives to monuments and commemorations. And it mobilized not only avant-garde artists and modernist intellectuals, but also some deep-seated rhetorical traits in the minds of Italians. In fact, the principal contention of this book is that the fascist politics of history referred to the Latin Catholic notion of ‘presence’ in visual representation (imago) and therefore tapped into that mixture of fear of, and attraction to, the ontological fusion of the image and prototype that had for centuries characterized the response to images in Latin Catholic visual culture.39 While the elaboration of a fascist mode of historic representation relied on modernist aesthetic principles, its mass appeal depended entirely on the widespread literacy of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes in Italian popular culture. My main argument, therefore, is that the institutionalization of fascist historic culture led to, and was sustained by, the formation of a collective historic imaginary that was at the root of fascism’s mass appeal and the intellectual challenge that observers such as Bataille recognized in the fascist politics of history. In a sense, then, this is a study of a specific aspect of fascist mentalité. I do seek to describe the relations between visual and mental images of history at the level of a fascist collective subject. Yet the notion of his-

Introduction

11

toric imaginary that I develop in this study is also designed to highlight something at once more essential about fascism, and more dynamic about the nature of collective mentalities. The term imaginary, as a noun rather than an adjective, appears rarely in Anglo-American literature, but it has been a frequent topic of inquiry in Romance-language scholarship, in which individual or collective imaginaires (or immaginari) have been the subject of extensive historical, literary, and sociological research for quite some time.40 Irrespective of their disciplinary orientation most studies – including this one – have relied on a rather intuitive notion of the imaginary.41 Collective and individual imaginaries have been identified as consisting of mental images, situated somewhere between the faculty of the imagination and the structures of collective mentalities, and guiding the former toward the formulation of specific ideological fantasies and projections; their formation has been aptly described by Luisa Passerini as related to ‘the unleashing of the imagination in relation to the written word’ and ‘the interaction between texts, their authors and readers, those who heard about them, those who appropriate and use them, those who fight or develop their resonance, and, finally, of course, the referents of these texts themselves.’42 To this basic definition, this study has added a specific, though not exclusive, concentration on visual, rather than textual, representations. In this respect, my notion of a historic imaginary can be usefully distinguished from the more familiar notion of mentality, of which it is both part and counterpart. If, as Fernand Braudel has famously put it, by mentality we understand that ‘collective mental prison’ that represents in relation to the freedom of the imagination what the past represents in relation to the present, the subject of this study may be thought of precisely as that mental area of conflicts and negotiations between mentality and imagination where past and present, subject and object, representation and action are not clearly distinct.43 Thus the historic imaginary analysed in this study is both a relational field and an inventory of images, which, as Passerini suggests, may be best visualized as akin to a ‘medieval bestiary’ – a never-ending collection of mental and represented creatures irreducible to either reality or fantasy and revealing instead the rhetorical codes that underlie the combinatory operations of our historical imagination.44 By fascist historic imaginary, I mean therefore the ensemble of mental icons in which the historic essence of fascism was imagined and from which it was projected into visual and ritual representations that aimed at making the past present, rather than seeking legitimization

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The Historic Imaginary

from the past. At the same time, my specific focus of attention has not been on the repetitiveness of these images across a unified cultural landscape – as implied by the notion of mentality – but rather on their transfigurations across time, media, and agents. The period I consider is the fascist ventennio. The visual sites of historical representation I explore range from history museums, exhibitions, and archives, to monuments, commemorations, and their reproduction in print and film. The historical agents I examine include museum curators, journalists, modernist critics, cine-operators, avant-garde artists, and Mussolini himself. The last figure, however, as both agent and mental image, is, as this book points out, the dynamic fulcrum around which the fascist historic imaginary revolved. The imaginary Mussolini spontaneously constructed by most Italians was the unifying referent for the successive transfiguration of fascist historic images. In this respect, The Historic Imaginary may serve as both a follow-up and a complement to Luisa Passerini’s pathbreaking Mussolini immaginario.45 This pioneering study of the fascist imaginary provided the first periodization and thick description of the relationship between mussolinismo – the spontaneous myth-cult of Mussolini, the man, preceding his takeover of power – and ducismo – the proper myth-cult of the Duce (leader) of fascism.46 Her study convincingly showed that mussolinismo-ducismo was a largely autonomous and even competitive ideological compound in relation to fascismo, and that the ‘Mussolinian imaginary’ of Italians was the principal and most enduring factor in ensuring a measure of mass consensus, and even enthusiasm, for the regime at all times. Confirming the gist of Passerini’s argument, this book shows that the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary was intertwined with the gradual transfiguration of mussolinismo into ducismo. Passerini’s study, however, focused solely on the mental images of Mussolini produced in biographies of the dictator before and during the regime, concluding that the key moment in this process of transfiguration was the institutionalization of Mussolini-Duce as an ‘a-historical figure’ in the 1930s.47 Concentrating instead on the visual politics of history under fascism, The Historic Imaginary suggests that the pivotal element in the transformation of mussolinismo into ducismo, was, from the beginning, the historic – rather than the ahistorical – image of the Duce, and that this image was also the key point of ideological convergence between ducismo and fascismo itself. The book begins by showing that a properly fascist vision of history was not the province of regime historians or ideologues but was contained in the famous Mussolinian motto ‘Fascism makes history.’ This

Introduction

13

popular slogan projected an image of fascism as a historic agent whose acts were simultaneously historical and historiographical in the ‘actualist’ sense that they made the past present in the consciousness of the masses. Chapter 1 shows that the actualist notion of ‘history belonging to the present’ elaborated by fascism’s prime philosopher, Giovanni Gentile, corresponded to a modernist theory of the historic imagination that anticipated, and then sustained philosophically, the self-image of fascist historic agency. Essentially, Gentile posited actualism itself as a reform of Hegelian dialectics aimed at affirming the absolute immanence of theory and practice in the ‘pure act,’ against all transcendental components of idealist as well as materialist thought. Consequently, the actualist philosophy of history rejected both Hegelian and Marxist notions of transcendental History, positing instead what I call a catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal, that is, the reciprocal immanence of the historical and the historiographical act. Every historical action was the fulfilment of a past act, just as any historiographical act gave presence and meaning to a certain past. Quite aside from Gentile’s active participation in the formalization of fascist doctrine, historiography, and public discourse, his catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act found its best expression in the visual and ritual representation of history. And, in this respect, the fascist politics of history developed in a quintessentially modernist direction aimed at challenging not only the positivist conception of historiography but also, and above all, the transcendental basis of both liberal and Marxist philosophies of history. My genealogical analysis, however, shows that Gentile’s theory of the historic imagination not only anticipated the ideological image of fascist historic agency but also rooted it in the fertile terrain of Latin Catholic visual culture. In fact, the empirical chapters that follow demonstrate that, while the actualist philosophy of history offered an intellectual support to sustain the ideological elaboration of the fascist historic imaginary, its consolidation was predicated entirely on the resonance between modernist aesthetic principles and Latin Catholic rhetorical codes. While the first chapter presents a close reading of texts, the following chapters take a different approach, in both form and content. They proceed diachronically through the entire duration of the regime (1922– 42), and the analysis focuses on different venues for the visual-ritual representation of history under fascism: historical museums and archives (Chapter 2), monuments and commemorations (Chapter 3), the mass media (Chapter 4), and historical exhibitions (Chapters 5 and 6). As a

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The Historic Imaginary

whole, these empirical chapters turn a microhistorical set of lenses onto the creation, development, and evolution of a historic mode of representation in fascist Italy. Given the development of microhistory in studies of early modern popular culture, the choice of this particular approach in these chapters may appear out of place at first. However, it is a response to some specific objectives that have nothing to do with the predilection for the anecdotal over the synthetic, or the exceptional over the normal.48 In the first place my choice of reducing the scale of observation to the level of the single cultural artefact, event, or reproduction serves to renounce, and in part denounce, the posture of moral-scientific distance that has characterized social-political studies of fascism for decades. Over time, this posture has not only privileged the ideological and/or class dimension of the phenomenon over all others (e.g., the psychological and cultural), but it has also implicitly supported the theoretical polarization of ‘fascism’ and ‘culture’ as antithetical terms.49 In practice this posture consigns the cultural events I analyse to that allencompassing, all-equalizing, and most uncritical rubric of ‘propaganda,’ and considers them, ipso facto, peripheral to either a historical or theoretical explanation of the fascist phenomenon. Reversing this view, my close reading of fascist texts, rituals, and images identifies in the resonance between high-modernist Italian culture and popular culture rhetorical codes a specific non-ideological and non-socially-determined historical agent that underpinned the production of historic rituals and images under fascism, and guaranteed their appeal for both Italian intellectuals and the masses. At the same time, the reduced scale of observation allows this study to also challenge the comprehensive visions delineated by some macrohistories of fascist culture without falling into unproductive polarizations between social and cultural history, analysis and narrative, and so forth.50 My close reading of the relationship between fascist ritual and image politics insists on their significant autonomy from the supposedly totalitarian logic sustaining the fascist sacralization of politics, and on their closer dependence on longer-lasting traits of the Italian Catholic imaginary. Second, as Carlo Ginzburg puts it, the basic theoretical-methodological model of microhistory is the semiotic relationship between langue and parole (language as speech-act and language as syntax-grammar), in which the latter stands for all forms of ‘lived experience’ and the former for ‘the invisible structures within which that lived experience is articulated.’51 In this respect, my choice of a microhistorical approach

Introduction

15

responds to the necessity of respecting the complexity and conjuncturality of agency while at the same time attempting to tackle the question of mass reception. The analysis of organizational acts, just as much as that of ritual performances and visual images, always refers back to the longevity and mass literacy of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes in Italian fascist culture, thereby also fulfilling the third and most important characteristic of the microhistorical approach. The central tenet of these chapters is to highlight the to-and-fro between high culture and popular culture, thereby combining conjunctural and longue durée levels of interpretation in order to locate different levels of agency, including the structural one of the fascist historic imaginary itself. Thus, the close reading of exceptional representational events and agents does not hinder the comprehensiveness of the account, but rather unveils the sequence of spectacles and images around which fascist historic culture coagulated. Our story begins with the interaction between the ritualization of the March on Rome – as the historic event that had ushered in a historic agent, fascism – and the modernist revision of history museums and archives in 1920s Italy. At the centre of this revision we find our first protagonist, historian and curator Antonio Monti, and the first icon of the fascist historic imaginary, a Duce Taumaturgo – that is, the image of Mussolini as healer of the psychological wounds of the Great War – transformed by Monti into a ‘thaumaturgic’ criterion of representation. In Chapter 3 I turn my attention to the contribution of the thaumaturgic Duce himself to the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary. Analysing Mussolini’s personal direction of all commemorative events connected with the 1932 cinquantenario garibaldino (the fiftieth anniversary of national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi’s death), I show that Mussolini personally and purposefully orchestrated this celebration as a historic spectacle aimed at highlighting the incommensurability of fascism and Garibaldianism. This chapter demonstrates that the Garibaldian celebrations did not merely celebrate the final absorption of the cult of the fatherland into the cult of fascism, as Emilio Gentile has suggested, but also brought to completion the imaginary transfiguration of the Duce Taumaturgo into the historic Duce.52 At the same time, my close reading of the representation of the cinquantenario in newspapers and newsreels in Chapter 4 also reveals that the significance of these celebrations was not limited to the unusual amount of personal involvement and initiative assumed by Mussolini in their organization. The central agent in the organization, performance, and reception of the

16

The Historic Imaginary

Garibaldian celebrations was the widespread literacy in Latin Catholic rhetorical codes that connected encoders (Mussolini), recoders (mass media), and de-coders (viewers and readers) of the events. The close reading of the organization, performance, and mass media reproduction of the cinquantenario therefore reveals that, by 1932, a properly fascist historic imaginary had been formed and was the principal agent in the construction of fascist historic culture. In fact, the following chapter shows that the Garibaldian cin-quantenario constituted only the first act of a single historic spectacle soon to be completed with a final historic act: the historic representation of the fascist historic imaginary itself in the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution that opened the commemorative frenzy of the fascist decennale – the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. By all accounts – including those revealing its very strong impact on antifascist intellectuals such as Bataille – the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution was the most successful cultural event in the whole history of the fascist regime. Predictably, this exhibition has assumed a central place in the scholarly debate on fascism, highlighting the attending split between ritual and image, the sacred and the aesthetic, in the study of fascist culture. Focusing on its eclectic synthesis of avant-garde aesthetics, several scholars have seen in this exhibition the quintessential site of the fascist aestheticization of politics.53 Countering this view, Emilio Gentile has forcefully argued that the exhibition constituted the first temple of the fascist faith, encapsulating the very subordination of fascist modernism to the fascist sacralization of politics.54 Both interpretations, however, have partially failed to approach the exhibition on its own grounds – as a historical representation – and have thus divorced it from the ‘contest of exhibitions’ that immediately preceded it: the Mostra di Roma nell’ottocento (MRO) (Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome) and the Mostra garibaldina (MG) (Garibaldian Exhibition), which were included in the commemorative program of the cinquantenario. My fifth chapter contextualizes the MRF in relation to the rhetorical encoding and critical reception of these two historical exhibitions, which constituted a crucial moment of intellectual confrontation between the ‘historical’ (MRO) and the ‘historic’ (MG) modes of representation. The MRF, in fact, was designed to challenge both exhibitions as history and representation, and it did so not only by putting on stage a historic representation of the fascist historic imaginary itself, but also by doing so self-referentially. The MRF projected the temporal form of the decennale onto time itself, transfiguring the historic Duce into a fascist unit of historic time: the decade.

Introduction

17

We cannot know with certainty if Bataille’s immediate reaction was more in response to the historic site (Mussolini’s reconstructed study) that he referred to in his letter, or to the overall historic encoding of the exhibition. Yet his post-1934 antifascist writings and initiatives, discussed in the epilogue, carried unmistakable traces of the long-lasting effect of the MRF’s excessive historic figuration, documented in my last empirical chapter. Bringing into focus the combined impact of the MRF on the institutional regimentation of the past and the spectacular evolution of fascist exhibition culture in 1930s Italy, Chapter 6 shows that the modernist impulse of the fascist historic imaginary did not subside in the second decade of the fascist regime. On the contrary, it was institutionalized into a proper historic culture that redirected the fascist historic imaginary away from ‘history belonging to the present’ and toward ‘history belonging to the future.’ Demonstrating the very material impact of the MRF on the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary itself, the temporal image of the decade became ubiquitous in fascist discourse, ritual, and image politics throughout the 1930s. Projecting the fascist present toward the future, the fascist decade provided a Latin futurist answer to the utopian periods of fascism’s totalitarian rivals – the apocalyptic one thousand years’ Reich of Nazism and the revolutionary five-year plans of the Bolsheviks. It is no surprise that, in the midst of the Second World War, the fascist regime kept pouring resources into the project of a Universal Exhibition centred around the celebration of the second decade of fascist civilization. In fact, I conclude this study by suggesting that in the architectural remnants of this never-completed exhibition, now integrated into a post-fascist Rome, we may still capture an uncanny reminder of fascism’s most visionary project, and its legacy. The Historic Imaginary contributes to the recent cultural turn in the study of fascism, but its main historiographical goal is to overcome the historical-theoretical impasse in which studies of fascist modernism and mass culture seem to have recently fallen. Collectively, these studies have documented both the high level of intellectual elaboration of fascist ideology and the way in which fascist values were transmitted through a barrage of ritual- and image-politics. In so doing, they have successfully challenged the long-standing historiographical dogmas of a supposed antithesis between fascism and culture and of the totalitarian paradigm of interpretation that for several decades reduced culture itself to a dependent variable of state politics. At the same time, as shown symptomatically by the polarized interpretations of the MRF, these studies have also tended to deliver two alternative images of the

18

The Historic Imaginary

Italian fascist phenomenon supported by contending paradigms of interpretation and disciplinary traditions. Inspired by George Mosse’s seminal work on the ‘sacralization of politics,’ several historians and sociologists have turned their attention to the ritual culture orchestrated by the fascist party, and its syncretic appropriation of Catholic liturgy and organizational schemes.55 In contrast, a number of literary scholars and cultural critics have sought to give historical content to Walter Benjamin’s famous theory of the fascist aestheticization of politics by focusing their attention on fascist image-politics and visual culture.56 Hence, below the surface of a common deconstruction of obsolete interpretative frameworks and worn-out dichotomies, the study of fascist mass culture has raised a crucial question: Where was the point of connection between ritual- and image-politics, between the cult of fascism and fascist modernism? This study suggests that the central nexus between the fascist sacralization and aestheticization of politics was the formation and institutionalization of a fascist historic imaginary. And, along these lines, this book seeks to champion a more sustained exploration of the fascist imaginary in, for example, the diffusion of the fascist rhetorics of virility at a broader popular culture level than that analysed by Barbara Spackmann, as well as beyond the Italian fascist cultural and geographical borders and the temporal limit of 1945. At the same time, in exploring the connection between Bataille’s amazement and the historic imaginary visualized by the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, The Historic Imaginary also seeks to contribute to a more constructive engagement of cultural studies of fascism with a theoretical tradition that was most sensitive to the Catholic framework of fascist visionary politics. I am referring, of course, to that surrealist posture best represented by Bataille – but also present in the work of Benjamin – that contextualized fascism in relation to a notion of modernity that, while maintaining a basically Marxist understanding of capitalist modernization, owed its principal intellectual debt to Nietzsche and Freud rather than Durkheim and Weber. Bataille’s modernity was characterized not only by the fateful dissociation of ‘the sacred’ from ‘the religious,’ but also by an association of ‘the sacred’ with desire, bodily functions, and excess, which could not be reduced either to the Weberian notion of secularization via rationalization, or Durkheim’s idea of the sacralization of politics via rituals. Bataille’s sacred in modernity was the result of cultural deCatholization. Despite the universalist claims of his theory of fascism,

Introduction

19

fascist Italy must have thus appeared to Bataille as the cultural and political laboratory of a specifically Catholic Mediterranean type of modernity (and, hence, as the spiritual ‘other’ of Protestant Atlantic capitalism) much more than the precursor and prototype of Nazi Germany. It is not by chance that, although Bataille may have never read a single page of Gentile, his discussion of the fascist appropriation of the sacred resonated much more with the absolute immanentism theorized by the philosopher of actualism than with any of the Heidegger that Bataille had read. For Bataille, as for Gentile, fascism was the manifestation of the ‘disjunction between the sacred and transcendental substance.’ Fascism, in Bataille’s words, had recognized that ‘God represented the only obstacle to the human will’ and therefore that with the Nietzschean ‘death of God,’ the will had surrendered ‘to the passion of giving the world an intoxicating meaning.’57 At a methodological level, then, this study seeks to build a bridge between the critical-theoretical insights of surrealist thought and the historical study of the relations among mental images, philosophical ideas, aesthetic principles, and rhetorical codes around which the fascist imaginary coalesced and in which it expressed itself in public rituals and representations. Along these lines, theoretical and historical works on visual perception and iconology have also informed my approach.58 In particular, Ernst Gombrich’s analysis of normative style and W.J.T. Mitchell’s useful notion of hypericon have been indispensable for approaching very different modes of representation with an eye to their common perceptual encoding.59 All the same, this study does not seek to yield a theorization of fascist iconology any more than it claims to be a Bataillian interpretation of fascism. To remark on the family resemblance between Gentile’s philosophy of the historic, Bataille’s theory of the sacred, and Gombrich’s notion of normative style is not to up this study’s theoretical ante but rather to highlight its ‘new historicist’ premises and goals. That is, I wish to confirm with Aram Veeser and Stephen Greenblatt that, just like every theoretical act of ‘unmasking, critique and opposition uses the tools it condemns and risks falling prey to the practice it exposes,’ the power of all histories lies not in revelations of ‘an absolute otherness that compels us to suspend our values in the face of an entirely different system of consciousness, but rather in the intimations of an obscure link between those distant events and the way we are.’60 What is essential here is the historical sensitivity of the insights offered by French intellectuals in the 1930s to the longevity and significance of Latin Catholic culture in

20

The Historic Imaginary

modernity. Understood from this new historicist perspective, the notion of the historic imaginary developed here seeks to contribute to a rethinking of modernity in general, and modern historical culture in particular, in light of the endurance of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes in the collective Western imaginary. As I discuss in my epilogue, the cultural deconstruction that the fascist politics of history effected on the transcendental notion of history cannot be underestimated or explained away as propaganda. The postmodern crisis of historical culture reminds us of the success of this operation and the fateful demise of the time-honoured notion of historical consciousness. Whether we consider the ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (as classically defined by Jean-François Lyotard),61 or the ritual announcements of the ‘end of history’ (first declared by Alexander Kojève in 1949 and reiterated by Francis Fukuyama in 1989),62 or the transfiguration of the fascist decade into the temporality of fashion, it seems clear that the postmodern age is more properly a posthistoric(al) one. We no longer believe in History as a transcendental whole, nor do we perceive historic events in the fascist-immanent sense of making history. Our minds no longer oscillate between historic present and historical past. We live, as it were, in a historic infinitive tense. Yet it might just be the case that from this perspective we may finally acknowledge that what we proudly referred to as modern historical culture was a historic(al) one from the beginning; that is to say, one predicated on the subordination, but not disappearance, of the immanent conception of history implicit in the Latin Catholic tradition of historia magistra vitae to the modern idea of a single transcendental History. The fascist politics of history successfully reversed this subordination but, in the process, consumed both transcendental and immanent poles of the oscillation. The unavoidable suggestion emerging from this study is that, by deconstructing modern historic(al) culture, the fascist politics of history set the stage for the formation of our own posthistoric(al) imaginaries.

Chapter One

HISTORY BELONGS TO THE PRESENT

No wonder, gentlemen, if side by side the shirkers of war we find the shirkers of history, who, having failed – for many reasons and maybe because of their creative impotence – to produce the event, that is, to make history before writing it, later on consume their revenge diminishing it without objectivity or shame. Benito Mussolini, 1929

It was with these words, delivered to the fascist senate on 24 May 1929, that Benito Mussolini responded to Benedetto Croce’s opposition to the conciliation pacts between the Vatican and the Italian state, and simultaneously offered a spectacle the whole fascist intelligentsia had been waiting for: a direct intellectual confrontation between the ‘Duce’ of fascism and the ‘Laic Pope’ of liberalism.1 On the surface, Mussolini’s analogy between shirkers of war and shirkers of history connected Croce’s opposition to the Concordat to the conspicuous absence of the Great War and fascism in Croce’s recently published Storia d’Italia dal 1870 al 1914. Yet, behind the polemical jab directed toward the philosophical champion of liberalism, there also lurked the suggestion that the ideological dichotomy between fascism and liberalism entailed two opposite conceptions of the relationship between res gestae and historia rerum gaestarum: fascism made history by producing ‘events,’ liberalism wrote it to unmake them. Overnight, in fact, Mussolini’s aphoristic sentence was transformed into one of the most popular fascist mottoes, ‘Il fascismo fa la storia, non la scrive’ (Fascism makes history, it does not write it), thereby losing its polemical bite but sharpening its ideological stakes.2 Turning temporal succession into all-out opposition, the slogan pro-

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The Historic Imaginary

jected an image of fascism as merging its rejection of political representation (liberalism) with the obliteration of historical representation (historicism). Could the catchphrase ‘Fascism makes history’ have been the expression of a genuine philosophy of history sustaining fascist ideology?3 That Mussolini’s public attack on Croce was perceived as a momentous intellectual event in the history of fascist culture was immediately clear from the newspapers headlines and editorials of 25 May 1929. Emphasizing the words ‘imboscato della storia’ (shirker of history), the fascist press enthusiastically connected Mussolini’s speech to the intellectual debate that, between 1928 and 1929, had pitched Croce’s Storia d’Italia against the first recognized masterpiece of fascist historiography, L’Italia in cammino, published in late 1927 by the prominent historian Gioacchino Volpe.4 The nearly concurrent publication of these two antithetical histories of Italy had brought the ‘question of history’ to the forefront of fascist intellectual discourse right after the closure of a public inquiry into the ‘question of art.’ As in the case of the public debate over art, the fascist propaganda machine had immediately proceeded to enhance Mussolini’s intellectual stature by highlighting the perfect fit between the Duce’s speeches and the fascist culture elaborated by militant artists and intellectuals such as Volpe. Yet, a comparison between the two debates also reveals that, from the point of view of fascist ideology, the two questions – of art and history – were not at all equivalent, and much was left out by the press presentation of the Duce as intellectual primus inter pares. The controversy over the desirability of a fascist aesthetic had been created and framed by two speeches delivered by Mussolini in 1925 and 1926. In the first, given to the Academy of Arts of Perugia, Mussolini had exhorted Italian artists to create a ‘traditionalist and simultaneously modern’ art and to avoid producing ‘anything that could resemble a State art.’5 In the second address, which took place at the opening ceremony of an art exhibit in Milan, he had insisted, instead, on a principle that was to become the hallmark of fascist political culture: the fundamental identity of art and politics.6 Encouraged by both speeches, fascism’s leading intellectual review, Critica Fascista, had invited artists, intellectuals, and prominent fascist leaders to discuss how they intended to accomplish Mussolini’s implicit mandate: to express in art the aesthetic essence of fascist politics. The diverse positions subsequently expressed in the pages of Critica Fascista conveyed to contemporaries and future historians alike the fact that neither tradi-

History Belongs to the Present

23

tional nor avant-garde artists could lay absolute claim to being the standard-bearers of a fascist aesthetic. On the other hand, neither Mussolini nor the fascist party ever sought to push the search for intellectual consensus into direct state control and direction of cultural activities.7 The object of fascist ‘aesthetic politics,’ Simonetta FalascaZamponi reminds us, was the living Italian masses, and its goal was ‘to give them style,’ not to dictate stylistic criteria to artists whose task was to bring inanimate matter to life.8 Despite the more interventionist policies enacted in the second half of the 1930s by both state and party, the implicit pact between Mussolini and Italian artists to allow the development of a competitive aesthetic sphere under fascism held throughout the ventennio.9 Unlike Hitler, Mussolini never imposed or even articulated a binding conception of fascist art.10 In the absence of an official policy on art form or content, in fascist Italy the question of art remained both open to competitive claims and dependent on a continuous dialogue between professional artists and the aesthetic politics the regime cultivated in its self-representation.11 But what about the relationship between the question of history raised by the publication of Volpe’s and Croce’s histories of Italy and the dichotomy between liberal history writing and fascist history making elicited by Mussolini in his 1929 speech? Did this speech leave the definition of a fascist conception of history open to the elaboration of militant historians, just as his 1925 speech had anticipated the arguments, conclusions, and lasting agreement to leave the fascist signifier open to competitive appropriation by individual artists or artistic movements? Or did it refer to a uniquely fascist politics of history? Fascist Politics of History There is no denying the popular association of fascism with a premodern and mythical, as opposed to historical, form of collective mentality best expressed in nostalgia for ancient imperial Romanità in fascist discourse, art, and architecture in the 1930s and even earlier. Yet recent scholarship has tended to re-evaluate the perceived hegemony of Roman-ness in fascist culture. As Piergiorgio Zunino has concluded in his vast exploration of fascist ideological writings, the fascist sense of time was characterized by an acute sense of discontinuity between past and future rather than a desire to forge a mythic identity between the Roman past and fascist present. For Zunino, therefore, Roman-ness provided ‘a sea in which anyone could fish out anything for any occasion: a

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The Historic Imaginary

reminder, a justification, a title of whatsoever nobility,’ rather than a properly mythic horizon. The ‘Romans of Modernity,’ a slogan elaborated, formulated, and repeated incessantly by all strata of fascist publicists, encapsulated not only the emotional charge attributed to the ancient Italian past, but also its ideological fragility. The texts, institutions, commemorations, public buildings, and ritual segments of fascist culture that celebrated or referred explicitly to the Roman past were obsessive to the point of ineffectiveness. They constituted categorical imperatives without consistency; their compulsiveness was an index of their imaginary poverty. Roman-ness and modernity thus offered to the historical imaginary of Italians a tautology of reference without dialectical tension: Rome had been modern in its time as fascism was Roman in the present.12 While neither government nor party ever devised a policy directed at influencing the orientation and contents of Italian historiography until the mid-1930s, the fascist intelligentsia was immediately aware that the development of a fascist vision of national history would be key to the construction of mass consensus as well as the fascist state, and to the formation of the fascist ‘new man.’13 As Zunino has shown, from the early stages in the formation of the regime the construction of a fascist sense of history was an urgent priority for a large group of journalists and militant intellectuals who sought a historical legitimization for fascism’s rise to power in the recent ‘national past’ – that is, in the period between the unification of the Italian nation during the so-called Risorgimento (1848–70) and the Italian ‘victory’ in the Great War (1918). Fascist historical discourse thus immediately assumed a thematic coherence and continuity that had no parallel in other cultural sectors. It was, in fact, from ‘books that situated themselves between historical scholarship and popularization, conferences, newspaper and journals’ that, in the 1920s, most literate Italians began apprehending how the unified historical course of their national history had been punctuated by a select cohort of fascist precursors.14 The discursive construction of a fascist past proceeded along two gradually converging lines: the affirmation of the revolutionary discontinuity between liberal and fascist Italy, and the exaltation of the genealogical line that led from the Risorgimento to fascism. On the first front, the stigmatization of liberal Italy’s moral climate, institutions, and policies was almost unanimous and monochromatic. In every conference, pamphlet, and editorial, the liberal cinquantennio (1860–1922) was characterized by the very weaknesses which the fascist movement had

History Belongs to the Present

25

denounced in its rise to power. Small-mindedness, uncertainty, passivity, lack of faith, resignation, egoism, and agnosticism were the terms with which the moral senility of the liberal period was universally scorned. Along the second discursive line, fascism was presented as the fulfilment of the process of Italian national unification, and every major Risorgimental figure was caught in the network of fascist anticipations. At the same time, the celebration of Risorgimental precursors was far from a monotonous inventory of their proto-fascist gestae. Rather, it proceeded alongside the identification of the historical limits of their actions. From the two discursive lines, there gradually arose a fascist historical imaginary rotating around two popular and complementary images that were diffused through all levels of propaganda: a ‘faceless’ liberal Italy and an ‘incomplete Risorgimento.’ Neither of these two images originated with fascism, but in fascist discourse they found a unique point of intersection. Among fascism’s Risorgimental precursors a crucial place was immediately accorded to the controversial apostle of republicanism, Giuseppe Mazzini. Mazzini, of course, had been the leader of the democratic republican faction during the Risorgimento, refusing any compromise with the Piedmontese monarchy that had led the process of national unification to military and political fruition. Yet his patriotism and moral Catholic doctrine of the citizen’s duty to the state left ample room for a selective appropriation of his thought and action by fascism. Mazzini was thus purged of all problematic traits and monumentalized as the prime Risorgimental critic of the liberal state and the ideal point of origin of the highest fascist values, including anti-liberalism, a sense of duty and sacrifice, fierce patriotism, spiritualism, and, above all, the subordination of the individual to the national collectivity in the ethical state.15 As a fascist precursor, Mazzini not only towered above all others, but also functioned as the ideal point of intersection for the two popular images of an incomplete Risorgimento and a faceless Italy. Furthermore, in the exaltation of Mazzini, fascist historical discourse found a crucial point of contact with the writings of fascism’s prime philosopher and intellectual organizer, Giovanni Gentile. It would be hard to underestimate Gentile’s contribution to both the formation and organization of fascist intellectual culture.16 From the early 1890s to the end of the Great War, Gentile had joined Croce in a close alliance for the construction of a neo-idealist philosophical front seeking to dethrone positivism from its alleged cultural and intellectual hegemony.17 By the first decade of the new century, their journal, La

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The Historic Imaginary

Critica, had become the central point of philosophical reference for a revolt of young Italian intellectuals against the materialist corruption and ideological trasformismo of liberal politics in the Giolittian era.18 And notwithstanding serious philosophical disagreements that emerged in 1912, during the war the two philosophers had strengthened both their friendship and their common intellectual cause. With the rise of fascism, however, their relationship was severed. Although Croce greeted Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 with timid optimism, and personally recommended Gentile for the post of Minister of Education in the first fascist government, he rapidly turned against both figures after the assassination of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti in 1924. In 1925, therefore, Gentile and Croce found themselves on opposite sides of the ideological barricade as authors of, respectively, the fascist and antifascist manifestos of Italian intellectuals.19 These two antithetical manifestos gave to Italian intellectuals the first and last opportunity to make public their support for, or opposition to, fascism, and to their authors a lasting symbolic leadership of the opposing camps. In fact, although in time several signers of either manifesto would switch sides or no longer recognize themselves in either of the two texts, the history of Italian intellectual culture under fascism continued to revolve throughout the 1920s around the philosophical and political divorce between Gentile and Croce. For most non-Marxist Italian intellectuals, the question of militancy for or against fascism continued to depend on their attributing, with Gentile, a proper ‘religious character’ to fascism, or on their rejecting, in Croce’s own words, such an ennobling label for such a ‘bizarre mix of authoritarianism and demagoguery, absolutism and Bolshevism, atheism and courtship of the Catholic Church, of sugary mysticism and cynicism.’20 For the two protagonists, however, highlighting the question of the ‘religious’ character of fascism also meant giving a political tone to the end of a philosophical alliance that had been crumbling since 1912. In that year, in fact, Gentile had finally presented his ‘reform of Hegelian dialectics’ in the guise of a new philosophical system named attualismo (actualism),21 which Croce, however, had promptly denounced as a kind of ‘religious solipsism’ and ‘idealist mysticism.’22 As Croce rightly intuited, actualism greatly contributed to the cultural climate of irrational spiritualism, antipositivism, and antimaterialism that made the fascist movement attractive first to disgruntled youth and intellectuals and then to conservative liberals in the aftermath of the Great War, so much so that even the contemporary Gentilian philoso-

History Belongs to the Present

27

pher Augusto Del Noce has frankly admitted that there existed a preestablished harmony between actualism and fascism.23 Contrary to the acrimonious debate concerning the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy of Being and Nazism, the only controversy concerning the relationship between actualism and fascism is not about how much of a fascist Gentile was, but rather how actualist fascism was. While continuing to write philosophical essays and treatises throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Gentile published dozens of articles lending ideological legitimacy to the regime and its cultural policies – an activity that peaked in 1932 with his famous collaboration with Mussolini in the writing of ‘La dottrina del fascismo’ for the Enciclopedia Italiana. In addition, Gentile not only remained faithful to the regime until the very end but, after the end of his ministerial experience, continued to play a prominent role in the fascist political sphere. Finally, Gentile remained fascism’s most powerful and active intellectual organizer, as the founder of the National Institute of Fascist Culture and of the Italian Encyclopedia, director of the ‘Normale’ University of Pisa, editor of eight academic journals, and co-owner of four publishing houses.24 Yet, on the ideological plane, Gentile’s main contribution was his Risorgimental interpretation of fascism founded on the actualist elaboration of Mazzini’s thought. Long before the rise of fascism, Gentile had begun elaborating an original interpretation of Mazzini as the Italian ‘anti-Marx’ and the theoretician of an ‘antidemocratic’ form of liberalism based on the individual’s duty to the state rather than on the rights of the individual.25 By 1924, however, he would refer to Mussolini as the ‘new Mazzini,’ and in the following years he would describe the formation of the fascist state as the realization of Mazzini’s aspirations for an immanent union of individual and state.26 Hence Gentile constructed around the figure of Mazzini a Risorgimentalist interpretation of fascism aimed at offering philosophical legitimacy to the institutionalization of the regime and epochal coherence to the development of fascist historical discourse.27 With Gentile, liberal Italy received a selected number of proto-fascist faces, which accompanied the Risorgimento toward its historical fulfilment in fascism. United in Gentile’s Risorgimental epoch, the revolutionary hero par excellence Garibaldi, the state-builder Cavour, the post-Risorgimento patriot Oriani, and the ex-Garibaldian and protonationalist statesman Crispi – to mention only the principal figures of anticipation – punctuated the historical fulfilment of Mazzini’s ‘Young Italy’ in the fascist ‘Third Rome.’ By 1927, then, when Gioacchino Volpe’s L’Italia in cammino finally

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appeared, the fascist intellectual sphere was saturated with expectations for a fascist history of Italy that would mediate between Gentile’s Risorgimental paradigm and nonprofessional historical discourse. Volpe’s political and intellectual credentials were impeccable. His nationalist sympathies – already well known before the Great War – had developed into active support for the fascist movement, sanctioned by his collaboration with Mussolini’s journals Il Popolo d’Italia and Gerarchia (1920–3). In 1925 he had publicly endorsed the regime and signed Gentile’s Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals. In the same year, Volpe was nominated to the directorship of the newly instituted Scuola di storia moderna e contemporanea (School of Modern and Contemporary History). From this secure institutional position he came to exercise a leading and lasting role in the reorganization of Italian historical studies.28 Between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s, Volpe’s School led a proper passage en masse of Italian historians from social to political historiography and from ancient to modern Italian history, thereby making the themes and historiographical practices of Italian professional historians increasingly compatible with fascist ideology.29 However, the central role that Volpe came to play in the organization of historical culture under fascism was neither the result of his nationalist leanings nor the natural outcome of the professional credit he had acquired as the leading medievalist of his generation. Rather, it derived principally from the intellectual leadership he had come to exert on war-generation historians as the most authoritative and outspoken proponent of a new intellectual habitus grounded in the active participation of Italian intellectuals in the Great War effort.30 Along with several other young historians and schoolteachers, Volpe had served the last two years of the war in the Propaganda Section (Section P), hastily organized by the Italian army after the disastrous defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 and headed by the Gentilian pedagogist Giuseppe Lombardo Radice.31 Volpe’s involvement in this central intellectual cell of the Italian war front nurtured his conviction that Italian historians needed to reconnect themselves with the political life of the nation, and abandon their positivist distaste for recent Italian history in favour of historical syntheses addressed to the general public. But Section P had also been behind the formation and diffusion of the historical myth of the war’s Risorgimental origins. This experience gradually led Volpe to redirect his research interests from medieval to modern Italian history, and to endorse, in Giovanni Belardelli’s words, the ‘positive function of historical myths’ and the role that the historical imagi-

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nation ‘had always played in periods of national resurgence.’32 Volpe thus emerged from the war as a prime representative of a generation of militant historians whose direct involvement in the intellectual war front entailed the assertion of historiography as a combat weapon for the construction of the present. His postwar calls for historians to become civic leaders of the nation not only resonated with widely held reservations about the highly refined, specialist tendency of prewar Italian historiography, but also seemed to support the development of a historical mythology to be diffused at the mass level of journalistic discourse. No wonder, then, that the fascist press anticipated L’Italia in cammino as a prime historiographical product of the new fascist Italy. Volpe’s history of Italy from 1815 to 1915 was concise, directed to the broader, educated public, and certainly relevant to the contemporary political life of the nation. At the same time, however, as a model for a historiography of the fascist era, Volpe’s book was directed against, rather than in support of, the historical mythology circulating at all levels of nonprofessional historical discourse. As Volpe himself explicitly put it, L’Italia in cammino was aimed at discrediting all attempts to create a ‘fascist’ history and ‘put the mask of the present over the face of the past.’33 With L’Italia in cammino Volpe intended to open an ideal space for a historiography that would reject altogether the fascist label while remaining within the intellectual boundaries of fascism’s fellow traveller. This intention was nowhere more evident than in Volpe’s presentation of the relationship between the Risorgimento and the liberal era that followed it. Although Volpe admitted that the Risorgimental process had been plagued by the absence of popular participation, the historical legitimization he offered fascism had nothing to do with the intertwined images of an incomplete Risorgimento and a faceless liberal Italy. Volpe’s narrative tied fascism to a century-long process of national formation in which the growth of nationalism from an intellectual to a fullblown political force was connected to the growth and organization of social energies, and culminated in the Italian decision to claim ‘Great Nation’ status by intervening in the Great War. In addition, while emphasizing the political ascendancy of nationalism, Volpe’s overall judgments on both liberalism and socialism were essentially positive in view of their respective contributions to the organization and secularization of the Italian masses, and to the development of the state through foreign policy. L’Italia in cammino therefore exalted fascism’s social integration of the Italian masses, but in a state built up by the liberal leadership. By the same token, Volpe’s periodization stressed the historical

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continuity between the Risorgimento and the liberal state without offering historical legitimacy to Gentile’s Risorgimental paradigm. Where Gentile insisted on the philosophical continuity between the Risorgimento and fascism, and between Mazzini and Mussolini, Volpe put the relationship between fascism and Risorgimento on the plane of sociohistorical processes developed during the liberal era and culminating in the Italian intervention in the Great War. L’Italia in cammino, then, did not perform the anticipated function of historiographical liaison between Gentile’s Risorgimentalism and fascist historical discourse at large.34 Rather, it sought to strike a third way between Gentile’s philosophical interpretation of fascism as the fulfilment of the Risorgimento, and the indiscriminate production of precursors undertaken by militant intellectuals and journalists.35 In fact, the debate that followed the publication of Croce’s Storia d’Italia augmented rather than attenuated Volpe’s equidistant divergence from Gentile’s Risorgimentalism and nonprofessional historical discourse. Notwithstanding the press campaign orchestrated from above against the greater editorial success of Croce’s book, the exchange of hostile reviews between the protagonists themselves was received by the majority of Italian professional historians as an invitation to integrate, rather than polarize, their perspectives.36 Most antifascist historians publicly sympathized with the political stance implicit in Croce’s provocative periodization of Italian history, but criticized the philosophical cage of his ‘ethical-political’ history, instead praising the social character of Volpe’s history ‘without adjectives.’ Several went so far as to criticize openly the tautological movement sustaining Croce’s critique of Volpe’s philosophical ignorance, his explicit attribution of an efficient and principal role to (his own) philosophy in the formation of liberal elites and the liberal state, and his polemical refusal to include the Risorgimento in his treatment of Italian history – a refusal motivated by an a priori distinction between the ‘epic’ history of the Risorgimento, good only for ‘kids and teenagers,’ and the ‘real’ history of the liberal era, addressed to the ‘cultured classes whose office is to lead.’37 Conversely, many young historians of the new fascist Italy met their nonfascist or antifascist colleagues halfway by refusing to choose between Croce and Volpe. Instead they sought to conciliate their teachings to better fight against both the proponents of a revolutionary discontinuity between the fascist present and the recent national past and those who asserted the uninterrupted continuity of Italian history from Roman antiquity to the present.38 Thus, rather than fixing philosophi-

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cal, political, and moral boundaries between liberal and fascist conceptions of history, the acrimonious debate that pitched Volpe’s L’Italia in cammino against Croce’s Storia d’Italia ultimately contributed to the drawing of a boundary between professional historiography and nonprofessional historical discourse. This, however, was exactly the line that Mussolini’s 1929 intervention in the historians’ debate sought to cross. As its rapid transformation into motto would soon confirm, rather than settling the question of history, Mussolini’s polarization of fascist history making and liberal history writing reopened the debate on a historicalrhetorical plane entirely different from that of the historians. Mussolini and the Question of History Mussolini’s labelling of Croce as a ‘shirker of history’ (imboscato della storia) mobilized all the moral political charge the epithet had acquired during the last two years of the war as being synonymous with ‘bourgeois traitor,’ thereby conflating the political event of Croce’s opposition to the Concordat with the historicist imagination sustaining his epochalization of liberal Italy. The moral logic of Mussolini’s attack implied that Croce’s negative political response was prefigured in his ‘shameful’ periodization of an epoch that – starting with the fait accompli, in 1870, of the conflicted relationship between liberal state and church and ending before the fait accompli of Italy’s intervention in the Great War – belittled the very events that marked the historical origin of fascism (the Great War) and its history-making claims in the present (the Concordat). Yet the rhetorical vertigo of Mussolini’s response neither summarized the positions expressed by Volpe in the debate against Croce nor supported their common enemy. Even though Croce was singled out as the quintessential representative of the ‘creative impotence’ of the liberal imagination in either producing or recognizing history-making events, the rhetorical horizon of ‘shirker-ness’ also included Volpe and did not entirely exclude even those fascist historians who, unlike Volpe, had interpreted fascist history making as a mere continuation of war propaganda in peacetime. Historically, in fact, Volpe and all the members of the army’s Section P had been among the earliest group accused of shirking during the Great War, suspected first of having found refuge from the dangers of combat in the safety of propaganda and then of having grossly inflated their own role in the victorious conclusion of the war.39 Intellectually, L’Italia in cammino had not washed out this stain. On the contrary, while rich in political implications for the historicization

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and legitimization of fascism, the book was a clear retreat from the militant habitus Volpe had advocated for historians after the Great War.40 It was Croce himself who, in recalling the episode twenty years after the fact, correctly recognized that Mussolini’s 1929 attack on his Storia d’Italia was not directed at this book alone but rather at the fundamental aesthetic-philosophical premises of historicism, that is, in Croce’s own words, that ‘just as for a work of art, so also for a new political, social, and moral order, one cannot determine its character and thus form an epoch before a new arrangement has been reached.’41 In the first place, Croce’s comment implicitly acknowledged the common denominator between his history of Italy and Volpe’s. Despite the polar opposition characterizing most interpretational aspects of their books, Volpe’s and Croce’s histories shared the reaffirmation of an epochal imagination firmly grounded in the philosophical tradition of German historicism. Whereas Croce’s Storia d’Italia had neatly bracketed the liberal epoch, truncating all lines of continuity with the Risorgimento and the Great War, L’Italia in cammino had epochalized the integration between Italian state and society in the pristine chronological space of a century (1815– 1915). Second, Croce’s comment explicitly acknowledged that the issue raised by Mussolini’s 1929 speech related to the debates on both art and historiography that had impassioned the fascist public sphere between 1925 and 1929.42 Although the two debates had followed one another, Mussolini’s speech reaffirmed that, from the point of view of fascist aesthetic politics, the question of art and the question of history were neither separate nor temporally successive but simultaneous and intertwined. The accusation of ‘creative impotence’ against Croce’s imboscamento (shirker-ness) from history-making events in the past as well as the present rested on the implicit claim that the creative and imaginative power of forming epochs no longer belonged to the historian as homo aesteticus-moralis-politicus. Mussolini’s idea of fascist history making ascribed this power to an immanent conception of epochal agency that was embedded in the very rhetorical style of his speech. As Barbara Spackman has recently argued, Mussolini’s speeches were central to the construction of a fascist discursive regime founded on a ‘rhetorization of violence’ intimating that ‘words should submit to the law of action and tend toward praxis.’43 Mussolini’s rhetoric consistently broke down the opposition between language and action in such a way that actions could be understood ‘not as prediscursive but as part of the discursive formation itself.’44 In the speeches that marked the construction of the regime, such as the famous ‘Discorso dell’Ascensione’

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(1927), Mussolini had relied on a ‘rhetoric of crisis’ aimed at ‘stockpiling violence’ discursively in order to ‘present the state of things beyond the time of discussion.’45 His 1929 response to Croce, however, differed radically from earlier examples in this respect. Mussolini’s argumentative register in this speech actively ‘epochalized’ the historical connection between the ‘event’ of the Concordat and the Mussolinian ‘speechevents’ that had marked its making – from the speech of June 1921 before the liberal Chamber of Deputies, to the speech before the Grand Council of Fascism in early 1929, to the speech of 13 May 1929 before the fascist Chamber of Deputies.46 There is no trace of a rhetoric of crisis in this speech, nor did the ‘shirker’ passage simply rhetoricize violence against Croce. Mussolini’s histoire événementelle of fascist speech events opened a window onto an epochal conception of the relationship between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum irreconciliable with any version of historicism, positivism, materialism, or idealism, and irreducible to the myth-making horizon of fascist historical discourse. To paraphrase Spackman, the rhetorical appeal of Mussolini’s juxtaposition of liberal history writing and fascist history making rested on its sudden stockpiling of ‘eventfulness’ rather than violence, and it pointed toward the popular culture roots of the fascist imaginary rather than the futurist rhetorics of virility. As the popular motto ‘Fascism makes history, it does not write it’ would make explicit, Mussolini’s rhetorical conflation of speech and epochal eventfulness referred the idea of fascist history making to the notion of historicness inscribed, since the dawn of modern historical culture, in the discursive expressions ‘historic event’ and ‘historic speech.’ Semantically, these expressions were born of the differentiation introduced by late eighteenth-century historians between the adjectives ‘historical’ and ‘historic,’ assigning to the former the meaning of ‘belonging to the past’ and to the latter that of ‘forming an important part or item of history; noted or celebrated in history.’47 Yet the discursive notion of historicness has never coincided with this historicist definition which presupposes a transcendental conception of history (i.e., the historic event is significant in the eyes of history). On the contrary, we normally define an event historic when we perceive it as belonging simultaneously to consciousness and reality, in so far as we experience it as opening up a new epoch by unveiling the meaning of history.48 In the historic event, therefore, we literally perceive history as immanent rather than transcendental. Indeed, despite the fact that no romance language has ever coined an analogue of the adjective ‘historic,’ the

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notions of ‘historic event’ and ‘historic speech’ have appeared in all European languages to differentiate between the temporal attribution of ‘past-ness’ to historical facts and the perception of ‘epochal-ness’ in historic events.49 Clearly, Mussolini’s polarization of history making and history writing mobilized precisely this discursive and antihistoricist notion of historicness, projecting the idea of fascism as a historic agent whose acts were not ‘significant’ in the eyes of history (and historians), but, rather, actively signifying history in the present. Accordingly, the logic of Mussolini’s speech effectively reified the ideological opposition between liberalism and fascism into an ontological dichotomy between historical and historic conceptions of agency, representation, and consciousness. The inscription of liberal ideology under the sign of the ‘historical’ corresponded to the projection of a fascist historic agency that acted upon historical facts, representations, and consciousness. By the same token, Mussolini’s speech ascribed to the fascist subject a historic imaginary that declinated history in the present tense and inscribed historical meaning under the immanent rubric of presence, and against the transcendental horizon of historical time. Lest we dismiss Mussolini’s advocacy of the fascist historic imaginary as a mere cipher of the fascist rhetorics of virility, we need to recognize immediately that the immanent conception of history it evoked inscribed itself within the intellectual context of a modernist challenge to the transcendental notion of historical consciousness. It is not so much that Mussolini’s polarization of the ‘historical’ and the ‘historic’ resonated with Nietzsche’s famous opposition between the ‘historical’ and the ‘supra-/un-historical’ and, along this path, with a whole series of dichotomies between literary modernism and historicism, spatial form and linear time, and speech acts and narrative writing.50 Rather, the fascist notion of making history inserted itself in a generational reorientation of modernist sensibility after World War I away from the Nietzschean critique of German historicism and toward the search for a new historical sense that, in the words of T.S. Eliot, would involve ‘the perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’51 As Hayden White has recently suggested, the evolution of a modernist conception of history in twentieth-century literature and philosophy was intimately associated with the widespread experience of the Great War as a modernist event. In particular, White has pointed out that after 1918 modernist literature and thought shifted focus from the cul-

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tural critique of narrative to that of historical consciousness itself.52 One may dispute the theoretical implications of White’s definition of historical modernism, with its insistence on the existential incommensurability between historicist conceptions of historical agency, representation, and consciousness, and ‘the experience of a different “history”’ brought about by the Great War.53 But any reader of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland,’ Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, Sigmund Freud’s Nostalgia and Melancholy, or Paul Valery’s Europe Today will recognize in these writings unequivocal signs of a modernist sensitivity toward the rupture created by the Great War in the transcendental fabric of historical consciousness. Among these signs, one should not hesitate to insert the notion of a historic imaginary elicited by Mussolini’s speech. Naturally, this insertion does not mean that one should equate a slogan – ‘Fascism makes history’ – with sustained philosophical elaboration or literary experimentation. Rather, Mussolini’s invocation of the fascist historic imaginary should be regarded as a document that points simultaneously to the rhetorical contiguity between modernist thought and fascist mass culture, and the historical origins of such contiguity. Just as fascism and its rhetoric of virility constituted a consistent political temptation for much of the modernist generation of 1914, the modernist ideas of this intellectual generation were expressed in countless Mussolinian speeches and institutionalized in many a fascist motto.54 Read in this light, the logic of Mussolini’s attack on Croce was not simply virilist – in the sense suggested by Spackman that it reaffirmed a discursive regime where language itself functioned ‘as one of the realities of force and violence’ – but properly historic, in the sense that it sought to simultaneously enact and historicize a modernist form of mass consciousness in which language and force had abandoned the realm of historical crisis and entered that of historic eventfulness.55 Unequivocally, Mussolini’s conflation of liberal ideology and historicism under the sign of ‘shirker-ness’ referred the fascist claim to have destroyed the boundary between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum to the historical-intellectual context of the Great War. In fact, the historic logic of the speech pointed away from the critique of Croce’s Storia d’Italia and the historians’ debate in the late 1920s and toward the actualist philosophy of history elaborated during the war by Croce’s philosophical nemesis and fascism’s prime philosopher, Giovanni Gentile.

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Actualism: A Modernist Philosophy of History Any cursory glance at the titles of Gentile’s production between 1897 and 1914 reveals immediately that the principal thematic nucleus around which his philosophy had evolved was the relationship between philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history.56 The ‘absolute immanentism’ in which Gentile identified the philosophical kernel of actualism found its pre-actualist formulation in the ‘circular union’ of philosophy and history that Gentile had elaborated in the first decade of the century. In the seventeen texts (two books and fifteen essays) specifically devoted to the topic, Gentile managed to articulate the circularity between philosophy and history from every possible angle: from the reciprocal immanence of philosophy and the history of philosophy to that of philosophy of history and history per se.57 In fact, the philosophical genealogy of Croce and Gentile’s fateful detachment from one another can be surely traced to their earliest exchanges in the late 1890s on the question of history and, in particular, to their antithetical evaluation of Marxism as a philosophy of history. For Croce, what was dead in Marxism was its philosophy of history, while materialism was alive as a useful historical methodology. For Gentile, the opposite was true: as materialist theory Marxism was mistaken; as the last speculative philosophy of history, it needed to be overcome.58 It is not surprising, therefore, that Croce’s 1913 condemnation of actualism revolved precisely around a critique of an undeveloped aspect of Gentile’s philosophy of history. While attacking actualism for its mystical flattening of all conceptual distinctions, Croce pointed his finger at the implicit antithesis Gentile had posited between past and present. By ‘reducing everything to the sole distinction between past and present,’ Croce contended, actualism resolved itself into a reversed absolute positivism. Everything was in the present-act, nothing in the past-fact. With this a priori distinction actualism could not but end by identifying history (res gestae) ‘with the series of images of historical facts that have been given at various times, no matter whether generated by historians or poets, by men of intelligence or idiots.’ Hence, actualism produced for Croce ‘a full immersion in a motionless present, devoid of oppositions.’ Its mystical essence was both cause and consequence of its negation of all philosophical distinctions on the basis of the a priori polarization of past and present.59 Croce’s critique of actualist time touched a central nerve in Gentile. In response to this challenge, Gentile at last turned away from the spec-

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ulative problem of the circular relationship between philosophy, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of history, to face the more analytic question of the relationship between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum. This development was reflected in Gentile’s 1915 publication dedicated entirely to this problem, ‘L’esperienza pura e la realtà storica’ (Pure Experience and Historical Reality), and was translated into fullblown theoretical terms in 1918, in his most influential political-philosophical text, ‘Politica e filosofia’ (Politics and Philosophy). By no means the final statements from Gentile on the matter, these two texts nevertheless provided a basic perimeter that enclosed within a coherent vision all the other immanent relations (i.e. between philosophy and the history of philosophy, the philosophy of history and history itself) articulated by Gentile in previous and future writings. Most significantly, they offered an answer to Croce’s objections rooted in Gentile’s original reading of the grandfather of idealism: Immanuel Kant. In the first text, ‘L’esperienza pura e la realtà storica,’ Gentile addressed himself specifically to historians by elaborating an actualist conception of historical experience in response to Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. According to Gentile, Kant had left this concept ‘obscure’ because he had construed experience as the medium that connected subject and object through the ‘sensible qualities’ belonging to both.60 Identifying experience instead with the act of thought, Gentile claimed to remain faithful to the Kantian ‘revolution of philosophy that established the subject at the center of consciousness,’ while divesting it of the transcendental dualism between reality and consciousness that Kant had been unable to overcome. Pure experience, Gentile argued, could not be transcended, as Kant had erroneously posited, because everything Kant conceived as noumena existed in the very act of thought, which therefore was, ‘autoctisi,’ that is, immanence of subject and object, sense and intellect. At the same time, Gentile conceded that the actualist collapse of experience and consciousness in the pure act had been anticipated by Kant in his Der Streit Der Fakultäten (The Contest of Faculties) and, in particular, in the section dedicated to the contest between philosophy and law.61 In this justly famous discussion, Kant had conjoined philosophical speculation with observation of a historical phenomenon of his own time, the French Revolution. The philosopher, however, was not concerned with the facts of the Revolution, or how they were to be judged, but solely with ‘the attitude of the onlookers as it reveals itself in public while the drama of great political change is taking place.’ For Kant, this

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attitude was characterized by disinterested sympathy mixed with ‘the passion and enthusiasm’ that all men direct exclusively toward the ideal and the moral. This enthusiasm was the sign of the Revolution’s Sublime. It made historical facts coalesce into a unique event that Kant proposed calling a ‘historical sign’ – that is, a ‘signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognostikon’ (a sign that will be remembered, that demonstrates, and that predicts). With the French Revolution, history had spoken its transcendental language to the consciousness of its readers rather than its protagonists, because, for Kant, the readers of his present time represented the readers of yesterday and those of tomorrow. The revolutionary event had thus proven the eternal law of progress through the impression it had left on their consciousness, and, in so doing, had signified the contemporaneity of all temporal dimensions – past (signum rememorativum), present (signum demonstrativum), and future (signum prognostikon) – in the historical consciousness of the masses, rather than of Great Men.62 Clearly Kant had produced in this text the first philosophical theorization of historic eventfulness. And, quite consciously, Gentile considered The Contest of Faculties to be an unfinished ‘fourth critique’ of history, which he aimed to correct and complete.63 For Gentile, in fact, by thinking of historical experience from the point of view of reading historical signs, rather than writing history, all distinctions between reality and representation, past and present, evaporated immediately. The progress of history revealed itself as immanent in the movement of thought during the act of reading. From the point of view of actualism, reading a history book, a historical document, or a historic event were all activities belonging to the transtemporal presence of experience. Because we can never transport ourselves to the past, we always make that past attuale (actual) by thinking its content within ‘our present awareness of thinking ourselves thinking the object.’64 Elaborating on the Kantian definition of historical experience, Gentile concluded that the very word ‘history’ contained the essence of his actualist philosophy of history. Actualism, he argued, did nothing more than unify the two meanings of the word ‘according to which history is on one occasion the entire complex of historical facts and on another their representation’ into one: ‘history is the only thinkable reality, and the only science because it is consciousness of itself.’ From this perspective, the difference between historiography and art appeared to Gentile as ‘analogous to the difference between the experience of being awake and that of dreaming,’ the difference being that the philosopher can

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judge the artist and the conscious man the dream, but not vice versa, since ‘every experience can only be judged by a superior experience, that overcomes it, and therefore cannot recognize other value [to the inferior one] than being an integral part of itself.’65 And, upon these premises, Gentile proceeded to explain the polarization of past and present. To think about, read, or write history means to ‘devalue all old experiences on the basis of new experiences,’ according to the same principle by which we may interpret a dream by ‘reconnecting it to the whole history of our individuality’ only within the experience of being awake. All the distinctions we make between real and fictional facts, past and present, are concretely born in the experience of reading ‘and come to the surface of consciousness according to the rhythm of its development.’ For Gentile, then, the actualization of history corresponded to the moment, in reading, when the subject awakens from the absorption in the narrative of historical facts and begins to ‘pour on [the] preceding reading the entire mass of judgments already organized by [his/ her] culture and individual experience.’ The Gentilian event was therefore no longer the sublime eruption of a historical sign from the transcendental continuum of history, which Kant had identified with the eye of the disinterested onlookers of the French Revolution. For Gentile, it was the immanent condition of every individual act of reading that dissolved the medium of representation between thinking and writing into a historical self-generation.66 Situating the subject of history (both res gestae and historia rerum gestarum) in the experience of reading, ‘L’Esperienza pura e la realtà storica’ gave philosophical expression to the Kantian notion of historic eventfulness while at the same time inverting its value. Abstracted from the historical context of the French Revolution, Gentile’s notion of historical sign embraced both events and documents, thereby replacing the funding notion of transcendental history with that of the reciprocal immanence of the historical and the historiographical act. In so doing, however, Gentile clearly went much further than completing (as he had wished) Kant’s unfinished critique of history. In the actualist conception of historical experience we may immediately capture the first kernel of a modernist philosophy of history. Gentile’s insistence on the self-creative sublimity of the reading event captured not only the antimimetic essence of any modernist critique of representation but also the yearning for a new historical sense that would render justice to the presence of the past in consciousness. At the

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same time, this essay still left obscure a central question concerning the relationship between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum. What conception of representation and agency did the identification of historical experience with the semiotic activity of reading signs imply? The answer to this question would come in ‘Politica e filosofia,’ a text in which Gentile completed his modernist philosophy of historical experience, but to the unique tempo of his own reading of the Great War as the historical sign of a momentous re-orientation of historical consciousness itself. History Belongs to the Present According to most accounts, including Gentile’s own, ‘Politica e filosofia’ constituted not only one of Gentile’s most influential philosophicalpolitical texts but also the key text in the fateful encounter between actualism and fascism. In considering its publication in the nationalist journal, Politica, Del Noce has argued that ‘Politica e filosofia’ signalled Gentile’s definitive detachment from liberalism by proposing actualism as the critical consciousness of a nationalist mass movement in the making that Gentile would later identify with fascism.67 By the same token, Gentile’s most recent biographer, Giovanni Turi, has identified ‘Politica e filosofia’ as the founding text of that Risorgimentalist interpretation of fascism, which, as noted earlier in this chapter, Gentile developed with two articles on Mazzini published in the same nationalist journal in 1919 and then elaborated on in most of his fascist period writings.68 In fact, Gentile himself would later refer to the fundamental thesis of this article – the obliteration of the autonomy of philosophy from politics – as having established actualism as the philosophical anticipation of fascism well before their political convergence in 1922. These readings ‘in hindsight’ have certainly rendered justice to the crucial role that this text played in the ideological encounter of actualism with fascism, yet they have also obscured a much deeper level of conjunctural convergence between the actualist philosophy of history, the Italian response to the war-trauma, and the formation of a specifically fascist imaginary. Essentially, ‘Politica e filosofia’ proposed that actualism had surpassed its idealist precursors because it had not only dissolved the fundamental dichotomy they had maintained between history and philosophy but, in so doing, also allowed the ‘resolution of philosophy into politics.’ As a philosophical history of philosophy, actualism had acknowledged the Risorgimento as the historical realization of philosophical modernity. For

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Gentile, Italian patriot thinkers had overcome the Renaissance dichotomy between spirit and nature by means of the very ‘idea of a concrete Italy ... which had become an active idea, producing itself its own realization.’ As a historical philosophy of history, however, actualism had also recognized that the conscious unification of politics and philosophy had not taken place in the Risorgimento but in the contemporaneous development of Marx’s philosophy of praxis. Historical materialism had incited the proletariat to unify on the basis of a correct understanding of human action as the unity of will, ends, and program for the dissolution of the state. For Gentile, the historical importance of Marx’s philosophy of history rested on its having become ‘the critical consciousness of the communist movement that refers itself to Marx.’ The crucial goal of actualism, therefore, was nothing short of unveiling the implicit philosophy of Risorgimento politicians within a counter-Marxist philosophy of history.69 This task Gentile took up in the central section of ‘Politica e filosofia,’ in which he elaborated on the reciprocal immanence of philosophy and history with unusual clarity, but also took his argument in an unprecedented direction. For the first time, Gentile presented the identity of politics and philosophy as the consequence of a preliminary choice between two opposite orientations of the historical imagination. ‘One moment,’ Gentile wrote, ‘history belongs to the past, the next moment it belongs to the present; but, most of the time, we only see the former, which is actualized in a historiography that presupposes entirely its object; and thus, only with great effort we are able to see the latter, which presupposes nothing, because it creates its object.’70 Quite predictably, the concept of history belonging to the past coincided, for Gentile, with the positivist conception of the historical fact determined in past-time and past-space, and it corresponded to a ‘representation of ourselves to ourselves beyond the heat of passion and action, since the fact is given as accomplished.’ From the perspective of positivism, history (the transcendental whole) ended up being identified with the nature of naturalism, an ‘irretrievable past that does not depend on us, but conditions us.’ The ‘historicity of history,’ Gentile instead proposed, ‘is intelligible only if we orient ourselves toward the opposite concept of history belonging to the present: that is, history that is all present and immanent in the act of its construction.’71 This was the mental reorientation that actualism had laboured to induce philosophically and that now, in 1918, Gentile believed had been historically realized on the Italian war front.

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Quite literally, Gentile read the Italian victory in the Great War as the historical sign of a collective reorientation of the historical imagination toward history belonging to the present. In the first place this victory was the result of a successful reaction of the Italian war front to the double event-sign that in October 1917 had come to endanger not only the Italian war effort but also Gentile’s whole philosophical enterprise: the Bolshevik Revolution and the defeat at the Italian army at Caporetto. By all accounts, the prolonged retreat that followed this defeat had produced a collective shock of unprecedented proportions throughout the Italian military war front, but its effects on the intellectual war front had been equally momentous.72 According to Gentile, the political success of the October Revolution had interacted with the contemporaneous psychological trauma suffered by all Italians over Caporetto, thereby feeding the spectre of an internal enemy undetected by other commentators. The traumatic defeat at Caporetto had temporarily helped to transform the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution into a new historical sign of transcendental history. After Caporetto, therefore, the internal enemy that the Italians had confronted, fought, and successfully defeated was not the revolutionary appeal of the October Revolution, but the very transcendental conception of the historical sign articulated by Kant in the face of the revolution of his times.73 Their subsequent military reaction and victory represented the defeat of all forms of transcendentalism (Catholic, Kantian, and Marxist) by a historic form of imagination. The Italian resistance and victory had ‘fulfilled the Risorgimento’ in the sense that Italian soldiers had actively internalized the historiographical image of the present conflict as a ‘fourth war of independence’ formulated by Gentile himself among others, and propagandized by the entire intellectual war front. At last, on the Italian battlefields, the historiographical and historical acts had come to coincide in the consciousness of political leaders, intellectuals, and the masses. Thus, the Italian experience in the Great War had acquired for Gentile a universal value. It constituted not only the signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, and prognostikon that superseded both the French Revolution and the Italian Risorgimento, but also, specifically, the historical sign that the Kantian distinction between onlookers and actors had been definitively overcome. On the Italian war front, intellectuals, political leaders, and a Catholic populace had experienced history as immanent rather than transcendental. For Gentile, the stage was set for the birth of a new political subject whose philosophical vision would be founded entirely on his-

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tory belonging to the present. And, since actualism had correctly anticipated this reorientation of the historical imagination, Gentile concluded his essay by claiming that actualism had overcome Marxist historical materialism with a more ‘realistic’ philosophy of history.74 Appearing as it did at the end of Gentile’s most influential politicalphilosophical text, this unorthodox claim to realism has been largely ignored by scholars of actualism, who have concentrated their attention solely on the central place of ‘Politica e filosofia’ in the Risorgimentalist turn of Gentile’s mind and the ideological evolution of actualism toward fascism. From the perspective of this study, however, Gentile’s claim deserves specific attention on both philosophical and historical grounds precisely because it subordinated Gentile’s ‘Risorgimentalism’ to the overcoming of the Marxist philosophy of history. Clearly, Gentile’s polarization of ‘history belonging to the present’ and ‘history belonging to the past’ theorized, anticipated, and sustained philosophically the ideological opposition of fascist history making and liberal history writing enunciated by Mussolini in 1929. But, as we have seen above, this polarization had nothing to do with the Risorgimentalist interpretation of fascism developed by fascist historians in the 1920s. Rather, it anticipated the more philosophical proposition made by Gentile in several 1920s writings that fascism constituted a ‘risorgimento’ (resurgence) in act, that is, the idealist-religious response to the materialist doctrine of ‘revolution.’ The resonance between the popular image of fascist historic agency and an actualist philosophy of history suggests therefore that actualism may have entered much more directly into the intellectual genesis of fascist ideology than most scholars have recognized.75 If, as Zeef Sternhell has repeatedly argued, the principal ideological roots of Italian fascism were planted in the intellectual humus of the ‘antimaterialist revision of Marxism,’ in Italy this humus had been fertilized by actualism.76 Gentile had not only been the principal Italian protagonist in the ‘reinterpretation of the ideological corpus associated with Marx’s thought’ but also, the only one who had focused his attention on the Marxist philosophy of history. Therefore, if – as Del Noce claims – there was a ‘pre-established harmony’ between actualism and fascism before their ideological encounter in 1922, this harmony had developed on the terrain of the historic imagination that Gentile theorized in 1918.77 In fact, Gentile’s claim to realism may have had even more historical substance than mere philosophical anticipation of fascist history making. The historical connection between the actualist exorcism of Caporetto and the fascist claim to the historic imaginary

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that emerged from the Great War finds significant support in the literature concerning the early development of a fascist mentalité. As most studies of the Italian war experience have shown, the defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 represented not only the central traumatic event in the Italian war experience, but also one of the fundamental factors in the formation and early mass appeal of fascist ideology.78 In particular, Elvio Fachinelli has argued that, during the three months of retreat that followed the defeat at Caporetto, there rose an ‘image of an endangered fatherland, dead or under deadly threat,’ which spread rapidly throughout the home front and survived well after the victory, ‘traversing the entire aftermath of the Great War.’ Rather than subsiding with the military counterattack, this image had provoked an ambivalent reaction in both soldiers and civilians. The perceived death of the fatherland had been feared because it represented the ‘loss of the supreme value for which all Italians had fought,’ but it had also been desired, ‘or even accomplished, in the imagination of some, in so far as the fatherland had been the cause and origin of the colossal and useless pains they had suffered during the conflict.’ It was, in fact, by tapping into this widespread ambivalence, and countering it with an ‘obsessive denial’ of the death of the fatherland, that the early fascist movement managed to achieve so much support among war veterans.79 Seen from the ethno-psychological perspective developed by Fachinelli, Gentile’s theory of the historic imagination may be seen as responding to the same ambivalent imaginary from which the fascist mentality arose and doing so with a catastrophic conflation of historical agency, representation and consciousness that paralleled and supported the fascist transposing of the ‘ideal of fatherland onto an absolute plane, entirely unknown until then.’80 In fact, this conjunctural configuration of forces is supported by Fachinelli’s observation that the lasting appeal exercised by fascism over large sectors of the Italian population throughout the ventennio was rooted in its ability to transform and institutionalize its obsessive denial of the death of the fatherland into an ‘archaic annulment of time.’81 Just as in archaic communities, the fascist movement responded to the ambivalent perception of the death of the founding value-figure of the nation-state with ritualized denial and, once in power, institutionalized a proper ‘catastrophe of the sacred.’ The fascist regime transposed the fatherland under the mythic sky of its Roman origins, while colonizing the collective time of Italians with ‘omnipresent rituals reaffirming the existence and greatness of the fatherland against the periodic resurgence of doubt concerning its destitution.’ Hence,

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Fachinelli concludes, the fascist annulment of time not only prevented the development of a proper form of historical consciousness, but also forced the regime to ‘move just like the tight-rope walker on the rope,’ stepping on the fine line between mythic affirmations of eternal time and ritual negations of historical time.82 Fachinelli’s study of the origins and evolution of the fascist annulment of time confers both historical and theoretical texture to the connection between Gentile’s notion of history belonging to the present and the self-identification of fascism with a historic imaginary. The actualist philosophy of history and the fascist historic imaginary were indeed joined in an exorcism of the war trauma. From this perspective, the mistranslation of Mussolini’s 1929 speech into the popular motto ‘Fascism makes history’ may be the best confirmation of the enduring connections among the formation of the fascist historic imaginary, the war trauma, and the actualist philosophy of history elaborated by Gentile in its aftermath. By the same token, throughout Gentile’s fascist writings and particularly in his 1935 essay, ‘The Transcendence of Time in History,’ one can locate precise textual traces of a continuous dialogue between an actualist philosophy of history and the fascist annulment of time during the ventennio. At the same time, this enduring connection also suggests a crucial qualification to Fachinelli’s thesis. The mass appeal of the actualist-fascist annulment of time was neither as archaic as Fachinelli posits it to be nor anchored solely to obsessive denial. Rather it was rooted in the cultural resonance between Gentile’s modernist philosophy of history and the Latin Catholic roots of Italian popular culture. Actualism: Between Cultural Modernism and Historic Semantics Gentile was a prominent member of the intellectual generation entering the Italian cultural scene between 1900 and 1914 whose modernist project Walter Adamson has aptly defined as ‘a cultural regeneration through the secular-religious quest of “new values.”’83 According to Adamson, at the religious end of the modernist spectrum we would encounter the Florentine Avant-Garde, united around the review La Voce, while at the secular end we would meet Marinetti’s futurists.84 But where can we situate Gentile? What new values did actualism introduce or support? And what role did Gentile play in the modernist intellectual field? At first sight, the answer to these questions would appear to be unequivocally documented by the reciprocal influence Gentile and the

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vociani exercised upon each other, as well as Gentile’s public silence on futurism.85 Indeed, the intensity of Gentile’s exchange with the vociani between 1909 and 1913 confirms Scipio Slataper’s testimony that, by 1911, La Voce was already transforming itself from Crocean to Gentilian.86 Yet, upon closer examination of the central argument of actualism, this first impression could also be reversed. The new philosophical dogma actualism affirmed was the concept of autoctisi, a neologism that appeared for the first time in 1912 in the founding document of actualism, ‘L’atto del pensare come atto puro’ (The act of thought as pure act).87 On the idealist-secular side, autoctisi meant that every action was an act of thought and every act of thought was pure because it was an act of spiritual self-consciousness. But on Gentile’s Catholic religious side, autoctisi was fundamentally related to the affirmation of only one version of the Christian God: the God of creation. It thus meant ‘self-creation,’ and it summarized in one concept Gentile’s claim to have definitively emancipated Christianity from both Greek philosophy and the Protestant Reformation.88 As Del Noce has suggested, actualism proposed a syntactical synthesis of Catholic religion and idealist philosophy that may be summarized as ‘switching the declination of God from the third to the first person.’89 And with this catastrophic conflation of creation and self-creation, the actualist syntax of the intellectual act came to converge with the futurist syntax of the artistic act as self-generation, despite the distance that continued to separate Gentile’s philosophy of art from futurist aesthetics. As Antonio Gramsci correctly intuited, the intellectual horizon of Gentile’s autoctisi was the same as futurism’s: the elimination of the medium (representation) from all (discursive, aesthetic, political) practices.90 In fact, the modernist nucleus of actualism may be identified in the systematic signification of ‘presence’ at all linguistic levels: syntactical, semantic, rhetorical, and grammatical. We could equally summarize actualism as the syntactical subjectification of objects, or the semantic contamination of philosophical and religious language, or the translation of rhetorical analogy into catastrophe, or the grammatical activation of select nouns into predicates: from ‘fact’ to ‘acting,’ from ‘philosophy’ to filosofare (to do philosophy). At the root of the actualist imaginary we thus find the quintessentially modernist utopia of a selfgenerating actant mimicked in Gentile’s famous habits of writing all of his texts as spoken discourse without first drafts or corrections and of subverting all orthographic rules. This syntactical homology between futurism and actualism positioned

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Gentile’s philosophical modernism squarely at the centre of the modernist Italian spectrum – mid-way between the Florentine (La Voce) and the Milanese (futurist) avant-gardes – a position that Gentile consciously exploited to exercise influence at both ends of the spectrum.91 Indeed, Gentile’s proposition of a modernist intellectual habitus alternative to the critical one embodied by Benedetto Croce might be safely identified as the crucial point of conjunction in the Italian modernist camp before and during the war.92 Yet, it was not until the publication of ‘Politica e filosofia’ that the modernist middle ground occupied by actualism since 1912 would find mature philosophical expression. While on the spiritual side the essay offered the vociani a Risorgimental religion that they would soon embrace on their path toward the political endorsement of fascism, on the secular side it articulated a modernist philosophy of history that celebrated the ‘funeral of the passatista (past-lover) philosopher’ (Croce) in much the same way as the futurists had done in 1914. Seeing it from the metahistorical perspective developed by Hayden White, Gentile’s claim to have overcome dialectical materialism with a more realist philosophy of history offered more than a polemical response to Croce’s motto ‘all history is contemporary history.’ Historically and philosophically, ‘Politica e filosofia’ situated itself at a crucial juncture between speculative and analytic traditions in the philosophy of history. While Gentile’s prewar texts had belaboured the speculative tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, seeking to purge from it its transcendental error, the notion of history belonging to the present referred exclusively to the analytic relationships among historical agency, representation, and consciousness. Actualism, therefore, did not resume the tropological course of nineteenth-century philosophy of history – replacing Crocian irony with an updated version of the romantic ‘historical sublime’ – as White himself too hastily proposed.93 Rather, Gentile’s notion of history belonging to the present theorized a collapse of res gestae and historia rerum gestarum that may be best conceptualized as a catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act – in the original Greek sense of ‘catastrophe’ (from the verb katastropheo), meaning to unify two distinct entities at a higher level. And with this catastrophe actualism fit all the historical theoretical parameters of a quintessentially modernist philosophy of history. Actualism certainly proposed a new way ‘of imagining, describing, and conceptualizing the relationship obtaining between the agents and acts, subjects and objects,’ and ‘events and facts,’ described by White himself as the landmark of all modernist conceptions of history.94 And it

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surely participated in the evolution of European modernist sensitivity after the Great War, characterized by James Longenbach as the search for a new historical sense that would involve ‘the perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’95 In fact, as we shall see in the following chapters, with the notion of history belonging to the present, actualism came to play a central role in the formation of fascist modernism. The actualist catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act connected the fascist rejection of political representation and the futurist theory of aesthetic self-generation with the elimination of the medium of (historical) representation between (historical) agency and (historical) consciousness. At the same time, the modernist thrust of actualism did not simply interrupt the transcendental course of modern historical semantics but gave theoretical form to an immanent paradigm of historic semantics that had both predated and survived it.96 Gentile’s concept of history belonging to the present did not so much refer to the transcendentalized notion of historicness theorized by Kant as it translated philosophically the original notion of historic present devised by early modern grammarians to indicate the use of the present tense instead of the past frequently made by Greek and Latin authors in ‘vivid’ narration of past events.97 This genealogical connection between Gentile’s philosophy of history and the ancient signification of vividness was inscribed in the very etymology of the term actualism. Actualism derived from the Latin actus (and its later synonyms and derivatives, actio, actualis, actualitas), which, in turn, translated the Greek term energéia as used in Aristotelian philosophy in opposition to dynamis (potentiality).98 Actus was the ‘vis efficax quae in aliquo agit,’ the active force aimed at producing an effect, opposed to páthe, the passive quality of potentiality. At the same time, in Latin rhetoric, actus meant also ‘figura’ and ‘ornamentum orationis,’ indicating ‘vigour of style.’99 The concept of actus, therefore, did not simply translate energéia but recorded also the Latin confusion of energéia with its rhetorical double, enàrgeia, which meant vividness, palpability. Neither of the two terms, in fact, had given birth to Latin etymological equivalents, but their hybridization in Latin Catholic popular culture was determinant for the discursive construction of the modern idea of historicness and its deflection in the actualist philosophy of history. Actualism and the discursive notion of historic eventfulness found their cultural premises in the rhetorical recoding of enàrgeia in Latin Catholic visual culture. As the early modern grammarians’ definition of the historic present testifies, the genealogy of the term historic led directly to the ancient rhe-

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torical connection between classic historiography and the cluster of meanings attached to the Greek term enàrgeia.100 ‘If you were a classical historian,’ Carlo Ginzburg reminds us, ‘you were supposed to convey the truth of what you were saying by using enàrgeia, in order to move and convince your reader.’101 Enàrgeia was the principal rhetorical quality requested of historians, playing the role that evidence would later play in modern historiography. Often, Greek historians achieved enàrgeia by using what later grammarians called the historic present, but this syntactical operation referred to a much more complex rhetorical scene.102 In Greek culture, enàrgeia did not simply mean vividness, but also indicated a unified representational effect of reality and truth achievable by both visual and literary means (painting and sculpture as well as prose and historiography). In short, enàrgeia referred the very idea of truth to the viewer/reader’s perception of presence in mimesis (art/narrative), thereby affirming the equality of the visual and the discursive in Greek culture. This unified rhetorical core of enàrgeia did not survive intact in Latin Catholic culture but was severed into a number of interconnected terms that separated the reality effect of discursive enàrgeia from its visual effect of presence. The discursive link between enàrgeia and the signification of historical truth was translated in Latin rhetoric by the sequence evidentia in narratione (narrative vividness), illustratio (description), and demostratio (to point at an invisible object). This sequence gave paradigmatic status to the epistemological foundations of classical historiography (historical narrative – description – vividness/truth) but, at the same time, destabilized the relationship between written discourse and the immediate signification of truth.103 On the visual front, instead, the Greek association of presence and truth was dramatically reinforced in the Latin conception of imago (image). The original referent of imago, the mortuary statues of Roman emperors, revealed a semantic affiliation of this term to the Greek ‘word/ idea/thing kolossos, which tied visual representation to the mimetic substitution of an absentee’ (the dead person).104 Yet, as Ginzburg argues, whereas the Greek kolossos conferred to its referent the attribute of intermediary between presence (life) and absence (death), Latin attributed to the imperial imago ‘a properly metonymic role, being considered as part of an identity.’105 In the Latin imago we find not only evidentia (enàrgeia) but also actus (energèia): the affective force necessary to perceive the fusion of representation with its referent. Imago, in fact, evolved to signify the real presence of the representational referent in all visual

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representations. It was this signification of ‘real presence, in the strong – the strongest possible – sense of the word,’ that came to constitute the rhetorical foundation of the Catholic conception of representation.106 The intensification of enàrgeia in the Latin concept of imago recorded therefore a paradigmatic caesura not only between Greek and Latin rhetoric but also between Greek and Latin Christian visual cultures. Via the dogma of transubstantiation and ritual practices such as that of the ‘King’s two bodies,’ the Latin notion of imago was appropriated by the Catholic Church and codified in the powerful motto that sustained its massive production of religious imagery: invisibilia per visibilia (to make the invisible palpable through representation).107 For centuries, throughout the Catholic world, the production of, and response to, ever more affective forms of verisimilitude (from high art to ex-votos, icons, and religious waxworks) were dominated by a mixture of fear of and attraction to the ontological fusion between the image and its prototype.108 This reinforcement of visual enàrgeia in Latin Catholic culture, which entailed a subordination of the discursive to the visual at the level of high art production, is apparent in the longevity of the Latin motto ut pictura poesis (poetry must follow painting) in modern culture. However, the endurance and consequences of this subordination in popular culture may be best inferred from the emergence of the modern conception of historic eventfulness. The rhetorical line that connects historic semantics to the ancient scene of enàrgeia passes through the formation of a visual paradigm of historical consciousness: a historic imaginary grounded in a mixture of fear of and attraction for the ontological fusion of historia rerum gaestarum and res gestae (image and reality). Far from dissolving under the weight of historical semantics, the Latin Catholic rhetorical tradition found its most stable recoding ever in the modern notions of historic speech and event, which fused the epic and the didactic elements of historia magistra vitae in the association of immanent meaning and epochal eventfulness. And it was this Latin Catholic yearning to make history (visually) present that the actualist philosophy of history at one and the same time theorized, sustained, and politicized. Just like the philosophy of history it announced, then, ‘Politica e filosofia’ opened two parallel but distinct paths for the contemporary reception of Gentile’s Risorgimentalism. On the one hand, the essay proposed actualism as the elaboration of the Risorgimental political philosophy of Mazzini and the philosophical anticipation of a second Risorgimento that Gentile himself would soon identify with fascism. On the other hand, Gentile’s essay claimed to be the theoretical elaboration

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of a submerged paradigm of historic imagination that emerged with the Great War – not the Risorgimento. If the ideological drifting of Gentile toward fascism can be read in line with the first option, the same cannot be said of the contribution actualism made by giving philosophical consistency to a popular-cultural paradigm of historic semantics grounded in the evolution of Latin Catholic visual culture. It was, in fact, at the level of the visual representation of history during fascism that the actualist philosophy of history came to play a key (if often indirect) role in the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary. As the following chapters show, actualism offered a philosophical roof to connect the ideological subordination of writing history to making history present with the consolidation of a historic mode of representation at all levels of fascist mass culture. The web of connections anticipated in this chapter found prominent expression in those public sites of historical representation where image- and ritual-politics, Mussolini and the masses, fascist present and Risorgimental past, and modernist aesthetics and Catholic rhetorical codes effectively met during the regime. It was in history museums, monuments, exhibitions, and anniversary commemorations that the actualist catastrophe of the histor(iograph)ical act was implemented and the fascist historic imaginary made visually present.

Chapter Two

IL DUCE TAUMATURGO

On 20 April 1920, an anonymous Italian Great War veteran published an article in the Milanese journal Riforma sociale entitled ‘I musei del dolore’ (‘The museums of suffering’). The article began with the author’s recollection of the uneasiness shown by a bus full of Milanese passengers when a war cripple, his face disfigured by a deep scar, boarded the car. In response to the blatant display of ‘bourgeois indifference and denial,’ the anonymous author advocated the creation of ‘museums of suffering aimed at opposing the idealization of war in any form’ in all belligerent nations. These museums would document ‘the sufferings of the recent war’ and the ‘devastating effects of all wars on man’s physical body, his intelligence and moral faculties, the natural environment, places and things.’ They would thus educate all men to ‘hate war,’ representing its horrors by means of ‘photographic material, statistics, illustrative graphics, and plaster casts reproducing the most horrifying wounds and mutilations in vivid colours.’1 Although fairly original in its formulation, this Italian veteran’s call for museums of suffering closely paralleled the contemporaneous project for the creation of an International Anti-War Museum (Internationales Anti-Kriegs-Museum) in Berlin.2 Both initiatives carried a pacifist message and an internationalist scope. Yet in the Berlin Anti-War Museum there was no trace of the pedagogical piety found in the words of the Italian veteran, and its realization rejected altogether the Italian’s call for the hyper-realist aesthetics of illustrative graphics and plaster casts. The creator of the Anti-Kriegs, Ernst Friedrich, was a militant anarchist, an aspiring artist, and, since 1918, a well-known member of the Liebknecht’s Freie Sozialistische Juden (Socialist Youth). His museum, funded entirely by donations by leftist organizations and indi-

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viduals, opened in 1924 with the explicit intent of challenging and ridiculing the imposing Prussian museum of war in Berlin, the Zeughaus. Like Friedrich’s famous book Krieg Dem Kriege (War to War), the AntiWar Museum was quintessentially dadaist in form and content. Its principal rhetorical registers were paradox, juxtaposition, and desacralization, as in the hundreds of helmets it used as flower pots, or in the photograph showing a mountain of cadavers labelled Kriegs-Stilleben (War Still Life).3 Its foundation clearly belonged to the history of the German avant-garde, its success to the political openness of the Weimar Republic, and its end to the devastation wreaked by Nazi squads in March 1933. In many respects, then, the Italian veteran’s plea for museums of suffering was much closer to that ‘older set of languages about suffering and loss’ that characterized the memorialization of the Great War in France and England than to the avant-garde language of the German Anti-War Museum.4 Like most Great War memorials in the victorious countries, the initiative of the Italian veteran avoided expressing triumphalism, anger, or celebration of military valour per se, asserting instead an ‘overall sense of indebtedness.’5 It gave voice to a diffuse feeling of religious piety and was meant to function as a ritual site of bereavement. And yet, the story of this original initiative does not belong to the history of bereavement in the victorious countries either. Rather, it opens a unique window onto the interaction between the Italian exorcism of the war trauma and the formation and institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary. In 1920 the Italian veteran’s plea was ignored. Its author, however, did not remain anonymous, nor did he abandon the project. Behind the anonymity was hidden the name of Antonio Monti, head archivist and future curator of the prestigious Museum of Risorgimento in Milan (MRM), who, in 1924, founded an Archivio della guerra (War Archive), whose origins he would recall six years later in a signed article entitled ‘La carezza di Mussolini all’archivio della guerra’ (‘Mussolini’s Caress to the War Archive’). In this text Monti recycled the episode of the disfigured veteran but dramatically transfigured the circumstances of this recollection. No longer the source of bourgeois uneasiness, the scarred veteran was presented in 1930 as the recipient of Benito Mussolini’s ‘loving caress’ during his first official visit to Milan, as prime minister, in October 1923. The veteran’s ‘tears’ were no longer metaphorical, as they had been in the first account, but were recounted by Monti as ‘real’ tears of gratitude, springing forth after Mussolini’s touch of the soldier’s

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‘deep facial scar.’ ‘That caress,’ Monti asserted, ‘generously bestowed by Mussolini upon the Milanese veteran, in the courtyard of the Sforza Castle, led to the opening of the War Archive.’6 A sincere convert to fascism, Monti reworked textual images and memory in the same way any novelist would. In addition, the image of a thaumaturgic Duce conjured up by Monti elaborated on the popular image of Mussolini as the ‘Man of Providence’ propagandized by Mussolini himself in his War Diaries (1923) and by several of his early biographers.7 Monti, however, was no novelist, and the significance of his transfiguration of memory cannot be separated from the fact that he had neither been a front line soldier, nor remained an anonymous veteran. During the last fourteen months of the war, Captain Monti had served with the official commission that had judged the moral and military responsibilities of Italian officers in the defeat of Caporetto. After the war, Professor Monti had become a key player in the construction of fascist historical culture.8 Seen in this light, the self-reflexive texture of Monti’s reworking of memory – ten years after its appearance in the anonymous article of 1920 – offers anecdotal but compelling evidence of the intimate and lasting relationship between the Italian response to the war trauma and the fascist annulment of time. Quite plausibly, Monti’s original proposal for the constitution of museums of suffering was born of his prolonged exposure to the symbolic deathbed of the fatherland (Caporetto), not from a chance encounter with a disfigured veteran.9 Similarly, the failure of his 1920 call for museums of sufferings may have had more to do with the ambivalent mixture of fear and desire regarding that imaginary event than with public indifference to the pious intentions of Monti’s anonymous plea. Pointing a finger toward the incommensurability between the enormous sufferings inflicted by the war and the idealization that had caused it, Monti’s museums of suffering would have exposed rather than covered this ambivalence. Fascism offered instead the appropriate exorcism of the war trauma, and Monti’s museum could thus reemerge as a patriotic archive under the obsessive framework of fascist denial. At a symptomatic level of analysis, then, the belated transfiguration of the war cripple from a victim of bourgeois hypocrisy to the recipient of Mussolini’s thaumaturgic touch suggests that – just as for many intellectuals of his generation – Monti’s endorsement of fascism was sustained by collective expectations of a historical pharmacon that would heal the psychological wounds of the Great War.10 And, along these lines, the

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textual image of the thaumaturgic Duce also foregrounds the crucial role that Catholic imagery played in encoding these expectations.11 Yet, below the surface of a creative act of self-justification for the author’s political conversion from Catholic pacifist to fascist, we find another trace of a more collective phenomenon. Quite aside from the real or imagined status of the first recollection, the location indicated by Monti for the imaginary meeting between the war veteran and Mussolini in the square below the Sforza castle was the latter’s first visit to Milan, as prime minister in October 1923. While the exhaustive chronicles of this visit mention neither Mussolini’s visit to the Sforza castle, nor the encounter with the disfigured veteran, the reason for this first official visit of Mussolini as prime minister to Milan is well known. It was a highly symbolic occasion: the celebration of the first anniversary of the ‘March on Rome,’ 27 October 1923. As Mabel Berezin argues, the ceremonies organized in this first commemorative occasion ‘established a repertoire of ritual actions’ that came to dominate the construction of fascist imaginary throughout the ventennio.12 From 1923 onwards the yearly celebration of the March on Rome encompassed the entire range of ritual genres that characterized the formation of fascist ritual culture. The celebration of the founding event of the ‘fascist revolution’ thus came to represent the fascist seizure of power as a mental historic site rather than a mere site of memory. It translated into ritual form the historic imaginary elicited by Mussolini’s 1929 speech: the March had not been a mere historical fact but a historic event that signalled not only the birth of a new historical epoch but also the emergence of a historic agent in history. The epoch it announced was incommensurable with any earlier one because fascism presented itself as making history rather than seeking legitimization from history. In 1930, then, Monti did not simply transfigure a personal episode; he endowed it with an iconic charge that cannot be overlooked. The imaginary link established by Monti between the thaumaturgic Duce, the celebration of the March on Rome, and the origin of his war archive gives us a clue to the crucial role that fascist ritual culture played in the construction of the fascist historic imaginary. As a textual image the Duce Taumaturgo pointed explicitly to the founding interaction between the formation of fascist historic imaginary and the popular cult of Mussolini (mussolinismo). The cultural construction of this cult had begun well before his ascendance to the leadership of the fascist movement, but had assumed during the ventennio the collective proportions of a proper ideology.13 As documented by Luisa Passerini, mussolinismo came to con-

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stitute not only the earliest, most enduring, and most ‘spontaneous’ expression of fascist faith, but also fascism’s autonomous double.14 Adulated by his followers or vituperated by his foes, until the very end – and even after his death – Mussolini was never entirely equated with fascism. As witnessed by the abundance of jokes mocking prominent party leaders, and the popular refrain that everything that went wrong was not the responsibility of Mussolini but of the fascist gerarchi (officials) that surrounded him, the popular cult of Mussolini was not only independent of the cult of fascism but even directly undermined it.15 In fact, the evolution and mass appeal of the imaginary Mussolini remained throughout the ventennio inherently collective, dialogical, and largely independent of party-state control.16 As Passerini explains, in its first phase of codification between 1922 and 1926, Mussolini’s image had been charged with the providential essence of ‘a refuge from the menaces of modernity.’ Its ‘uniqueness’ was celebrated as an oxymoron ‘capable of containing within itself all oppositions’; its first collective value was established as representing ‘Italianness’ itself.17 Later on, however, mussolinismo began evolving into a more institutionalized cult of the Duce in connection with the atmosphere of sacredness and rituality in which the regime sought to envelop itself. For Passerini, in this crucial phase of mutual exaltation between masses and leader, Mussolini’s image expanded beyond the confines of its earlier identification with ‘Italy’ and toward an ‘ahistorical figure that [did] not succumb to the flux of time, and, positioned in an eternal present, embodie[d] the immortal primacy of the Italian spirit.’18 Seen in this context, Monti’s image of the Duce Taumaturgo situated itself at a crucial nexus in the evolution of the spontaneous myth of Mussolini (mussolinismo) toward a properly fascist cult of the Duce (ducismo). It took the ahistorical Mussolini a step toward the status of historic agent and maker of history, but in so doing, it also revealed the self-reflexive iconicity of all Mussolinian images. Monti’s textual image elicited and deflected the thaumaturgic tenure of Monti’s own history-making activities. The very act of transfiguration underscored how Monti’s war archive sought to be ‘thaumaturgic’ by recoding and intensifying the pious purpose he had earlier envisaged for the musei del dolore. Unlike similar institutions established in Italy and abroad, the Milanese War Archive was not meant to be ‘an assortment of weapons or a reconstruction of battle scenes’ but rather a collection of unofficial documents illustrating how, in Monti’s words, ‘Italy had been able to neutralize [...] the imposed, and sanctioned violence of war, by

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means of innumerable acts of compassion and human solidarity.’19 At the same time, linking the origin of the archive to the ritual site of fascist historicness, Monti’s fantasy of history sought to present his imagemaking activities as protagonist in the fascist collapse of historical imagination and politics under the rubric of making history. More than a symptom, then, Monti’s Duce Taumaturgo constituted a proper hypericon: an image that speaks of the nature of historical representation during fascism.20 On one hand this image suggests that, just like the emergence of a historic imaginary during the Great War, the elaboration of a historic culture in 1920s Italy was intimately connected to the popular source of fascist ritual culture, Latin Catholic rhetorical codes. On the other hand, however, it invites us to analyse Monti’s image-making activities as primary ideological sites where the historic imaginary that erupted with the Great War began to be translated into a proper mode of historic representation during the first decade of fascist rule. The Thaumaturgic Archive When Antonio Monti joined the Milanese Museum of Risorgimento (MRM), in 1911, the museum did not even have a catalogue and was arranged in ‘picturesque and chaotic disorder.’21 By the time he was appointed director of the museum in 1925, his quantitative and qualitative changes were already so extensive that the museum was looked upon as the model for all other Risorgimento museums in Italy. In Monti’s own words, the MRM, having been a series of ‘personal shrines,’ had become ‘a scientific institute aimed at providing the specialized means necessary to the study of the thought, the intellectual currents, and the spiritual movements centred around the Risorgimento.’22 All exhibition rooms had been restructured according to strict chronological criteria, and the library and archive had been thoroughly augmented, rationalized, and catalogued. By the early 1930s, all of his peers credited Monti with having transformed completely this old institution (founded in 1884) into the first ‘modern’ institute of contemporary history in Italy.23 However, in the eyes of both fascist authorities and Italian historians, it was the constitution of the Great War Archive that granted Monti undisputed leadership in the modernization of historical representation under fascism and that established his ‘Great War-Risorgimento’ museum complex as the model to which all others should gradually conform. The archive’s original nucleus was a collector’s gift, but between 1926

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and 1930 Monti launched a competition for the collection of war documents among Italian students and teachers of all levels. Excluded, however, were relics and ‘objects of any kind,’ because they did not fit with the specific goal of the archive, which was, in Monti’s own words, ‘to document the grafomania [compulsive letter-writing] of Italian soldiers, [which was] one of the chief characteristics of a war marked by long and enervating pauses.’24 By 1930 the competition had produced a grand total of 500,000 filed and catalogued documents so that, in 1934, in commemorating the tenth anniversary of its constitution, Monti could refer to the original process by which the archive had been constituted as fixing ‘definitively and without possible equivocation its unique nature and goals.’ Specifically, the archive was intended to document the conflict as a ‘gigantic psychological fact’ that continued to affect the lives of the men who fought, just as much as those of their sons and daughters.25 This was a task, Monti added, that the archive performed by means of catalogues compiled with the specific aim of attracting the likes of those ‘scholars and teachers who, during the war, had greatly contributed to the resistance and propaganda effort with a massive production of pamphlets, conferences, and posters.’26 Monti singled out the subject catalogue as the archive’s most ‘scientific’ contribution, insisting on headings pertaining to cultural activities supporting or produced by the war effort in connection with the ‘psychological factors’ pertaining to war conditions.27 And, in order to demonstrate the scientific nature of this catalogue, he commented at length on the documents that a hypothetical scholar could have consulted under the heading ‘Wartime Religion’ for a study of ‘the popular expression of religious sentiment and, in particular, of the southern soldier’s cult of the Virgin Mary.’ He then proceeded to illustrate four sections of documents (ex-votos, amulets, manuscripts, and images), all of them pointing to the soldiers’ faith in the ‘thaumaturgic intervention of the Virgin.’ At the same time, he insisted on the process by which these documents, ‘collected by the archive, and there compulsively examined (compulsati), studied and catalogued, reacquire[d] all their flavour and expressiveness.’ In this way, the subject categories offered scholars organic units together with an invitation to focus on the affective particulars of each item – the ‘strangest’ ex-votos shaped as coffins, the awkward ‘bureaucratic flavour’ of certain dedications, even the contrast ‘between the fierce and ferocious look’ assumed by some soldiers in group photographs and ‘the trusting humility of their requests.’28 This 1934 presentation of the archive’s subject catalogue could not

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have resonated more explicitly with the image of the Duce Taumaturgo Monti had conjured up four years before. In fact, it highlighted the thaumaturgic tenor of his whole enterprise. On the one hand, the chosen mode of collection had been designed to heal the children of the war generation. On the other hand, the archive’s catalogues were intended to give access to the psychological history of the war in order to mobilize Monti’s intellectual peers by bearing witness to the patriotic militancy of wartime intellectuals. For its proud creator, then, the subject catalogue represented a scientific achievement not simply because it gave coherence to a chaotic mass of documents but, more importantly, because it directed scholarly attention toward the war as a gigantic psychological fact. Still, the question remains: On what epistemological basis could Monti claim the scientific status of this highly selective subject catalogue? And what exactly was the ‘gigantic psychological’ fact that the archive was supposed to document? In the first place, Monti’s insistence on documents reacquiring their ‘flavour’ thanks to ‘compulsive’ studying and cataloguing enlisted a romantic sensitivity, derived from his museological training, in the archival recoding of the relationship between historical narrative and trace. As Stephen Bann has shown, early nineteenth-century romanticism had elaborated on the antiquarian sensitivity to the past ‘modeled directly on sensory experience,’ adding an ‘affective view of history’ particularly appropriate to the development of visual forms of historical representation.29 Over the course of the century, however, historical writing had ‘taken over the primary role of serving as an icon of the historical process,’ thereby draining objects, ruins, and images of their original catalytic roles. Marginalized by the professionalization of historiography and the rise of the realist novel, Bann concludes, the romantic view of history had taken refuge in the history museum, whose hallmark lay in an ‘enveloping effect’ and the ‘evocation of the sense of smell.’30 In this way history museums not only challenged the subordination of the inferior senses of touch, taste, and smell to the superior organ of internalized sight – inherent in the literary narrativization of the past – but also reversed the subordination of the antiquarian sensitivity to narrative compulsion. Seen from Bann’s perspective, the terminology used by Monti in describing the sensory appeal of archival documents linked his war archive precisely to the romantic epistemology of history museums. The subject catalogue was like a menu of archival tidbits highlighting their organic nature. Each item acquired a fully metonymic power by virtue

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of its inclusion in one or more subject headings; each heading contained the synecdochic promise of an organic relationship to contiguous ones. Hence the scholar was freed from the anxiety of constructing a narrative, since the archive director had already prefigured one for him. Instead, scholars could let themselves be taken in by the singular flavour and expressivity of each item. The secret of a thaumaturgic chain of effects, which Monti’s own analysis of the ex-votos iconically mimicked, therefore lay in forgetting what Bann calls ‘the Law,’ that is, narrative compulsion. At the same time, however, Monti’s insistence on the archive’s documentation of the Great War as a gigantic ‘psychological fact’ also revealed a desire to merge a romantic sensitivity to the sensory experience of the past with a specifically actualist approach to the question of historical representation. As a young historian, Monti grew up in the cultural atmosphere of neo-idealism. An avid reader of and subscriber to La Critica, he also exchanged a few letters with Croce and probably met him on several occasions before the war.31 During the war, however, Monti was also one of the many Risorgimento historians who began to see in Giovanni Gentile their new guiding star and the avenger of their traditional historiographical subordination to classicists and medievalists. Long before his anonymous call for a museum of war sufferings, Monti was among the first Italian historians to support explicitly Gentile’s thesis that the Italian victory in the Great War ‘completed the historical cycle of our Risorgimento.’32 And whether or not Monti ever read Gentile’s ‘Politica e filosofia,’ the self-reflexive tenor of Monti’s presentation leaves no doubt concerning the role that the actualist philosophy of history played in mediating the fusion of fascist ideology and Latin Catholic rhetorics into his thaumaturgic conception of the war archive. The selective stress Monti laid on the activities of wartime intellectuals makes clear that the ‘gigantic psychological fact’ the archive was supposed to document, and sustain, was the very orientation of fascist historical consciousness toward ‘history belonging to the present’ theorized by Gentile. In fact, Monti’s revision of the Milanese Museum of Risorgimento confirms that his image-making activities revolved around the desire to give visual form to the Gentilian catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act. The Actualist Museum If the integration of romantic aesthetics and actualist philosophy of history marked the foundation of the Milanese Archivio della guerra, their

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compounding was equally determinant in Monti’s designs for the integration of the Great War and Risorgimento into a single archive and museum complex. In a memorandum written in 1925, shortly after his appointment as director, Monti announced his plan to transform the Milanese Museum of Risorgimento from a ‘patriotic museum’ into a ‘historical documentary of political and civic occurrences in Italy from the end of the eighteenth century to our days.’33 But what else could a museum of the Risorgimento be, other than a patriotic museum? Monti never developed in print his reform project, nor did he go much further than cryptic or sarcastic remarks concerning his predecessors, but a brief look at the prewar arrangement of these museums helps clarify his statement.34 Risorgimento museums have a precise origin – the Risorgimento Pavilion set up at the 1884 National Fair in Turin – but an uneven development both geographically and chronologically. The Turin Pavilion established the interpretative model for the first museums and local politics determined their variations; but what made them all (in Monti’s words) ‘patriotic’ rather than ‘historical’ museums was the absolute privilege that their organizers accorded to emotional over archival or documentary value. In the total absence of technical training and disposition, the first curators displayed the selected items with no regard for chronology but with an evident obsession to induce a process of physical identification with the protagonists of the Risorgimento. As Bann would say, they pushed to the limit the synecdochic principles of the romantic paradigm, organizing all museum rooms according to ‘theme and ambience’ so that ‘the object from the past became the basis for an integrative construction of historical totalities.’35 None of the newly founded museums could match Milan’s in bringing this model of synecdochic representation to late-romantic perfection. One of its most prestigious founders, Cesare Correnti, was the most outspoken fin-de-siècle sponsor of a type of display aimed at ‘sparking the [viewers’] imagination, by exhibiting “objects that excite the senses.”’36 Yet the romantic poetics exalted by Correnti and embodied in the first arrangement of the Milanese museum do not at all explain Monti’s opposition to a ‘patriotic’ conception of historical representation. The negative connotation given by Monti to the highest fascist virtue, patriotism, cannot be taken literally or simply metaphorically. It does not indicate a political aversion to patriotic sentiment; it is not simply a synonym for ‘romantic.’ As Monti’s frequent references to a 1906 public discussion of Risorgimento museums suggest, the term

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patriotic referred to a fetishistic conception of the exhibition best exemplified in the work and words of the second curator of the Milanese museum, Ludovico Corio (1900–1911). Responding to the harsh criticism of two colleagues, Corio disclosed the root of the patriotic paradigm at the First Congress of Risorgimento Historians in 1906: ‘How can we say “I can accept this item, I cannot accept that other one?” How can we tell a poor old woman, “look this item we must exhibit in this display case, this other item in another case?” It’s a question of empathy: it seems to me that this is not yet the time for saying, “No, we can’t accept the relics of those glorious times.” Otherwise they will end up in the hands of speculators who will sell them back to us at a higher price when we will look for them at a future time (applause).’37 The applause that met Corio’s explicit reference to the hypothetical exchange value of Risorgimental relics was not only a sign of widespread support for his empathetic conception of the museum, but also a clue to the anomalous status of Risorgimento museums in the late-romantic panorama described by Bann. For Corio and a majority of his peers, the directors of Risorgimento museums were not only called upon to accept all relics; they were also obliged not to select or separate them but to display them together as a whole. This is a situation whose peculiarity may be best appreciated in the light of the late-romantic theory of historical value elaborated by Alois Riegl in his classic essay ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin.’38 Although written specifically to evaluate the differences among historicist, antiquarian, and ‘modern’ approaches to the preservation of historical monuments, Riegl’s essay addressed a number of general issues concerning the relationship between nineteenth-century historical epistemology and the field of aesthetic perception. In particular, Riegl proposed a distinction between the ‘age value’ and the ‘historical value as memory’ of all objects from the past, based upon the viewer’s perception. Age value revealed itself to any viewer in the object’s ‘weathered appearance’ (incompleteness, lack of wholeness, a tendency to dissolve form and colour), while historical value was recognized and assigned only by learned viewers ‘in accordance with the modern notion that what has been can never be again, and that everything that has been constitutes an irreplaceable and irremovable link in a chain of development.’39 Clearly the Italian museum directors neither attributed historical value to their objects nor exhibited them simply because of the emotional appeal of their age value. Risorgimento relics were exhibited as

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signs of ‘memory-value’ per se. As the generation of historical actors disappeared, museum directors sought to displace an anxiety concerning the rise of conflicting interpretations of the events onto a fetishization of relics. Indeed, the symbolic economy of value inscribed at the heart of the Risorgimento museum adhered to Jean Baudrillard’s classic definition of fetishism. These museums reified a supposedly original form of value into a metaphysics of value that ‘register[ed] itself as a kind of moral law at the heart of the object – and it [was] inscribed there as the finality of the ‘need’ of the subject.’40 They presented themselves as both the embodiment of a collective injunction to remember and the affirmation of an equally collective need for memory. It was to this fetishistic economy of the historical sign that Monti referred in his first public attack on the patriotic conception of Risorgimento museums at the Twelfth Congress of Risorgimento Historians (Turin, 1924). Beginning with a discussion of ‘the limits to be imposed on the exhibition of objects,’ he affirmed uncompromisingly that ‘hair, nails, bloodstained rags, bone fragments, butt ends of cigars, and similar stuff should be forever banned from any museum.’41 While seeking to purge Risorgimento museums of the late-romantic fetishization of memory that had characterized the activities of his predecessors, Monti’s opposition to relics was also in perfect keeping with the exclusion of objects from his war archive. In fact, Monti conceptualized his overall strategy as transforming Risorgimento museums from a series of personal ‘shrines’ into institutions ‘aimed at providing the specialized means necessary to the study of the thought, the intellectual currents, and the spiritual movements centred around the Risorgimento.’42 To this effect, he called the attention of his colleagues to ‘four significant issues’ pertaining to what he termed ‘technical preservation and display’: 1. The limits of the period intended by the term ‘Risorgimento’ 2. Whether to exhibit photographs of materials belonging to other museums alongside the home museum’s collection 3. Whether, and to what extent, the museums should also exhibit items not specifically patriotic 4. Whether, and according to which criteria, the Risorgimento museums should make space for the documentation of the Great War43 Surely the four issues raised by Monti were anything but ‘technical.’ On the contrary, Monti’s historiographical concern for the inclusion of the

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Great War in the Risorgimental epoch clearly framed their sequence. Although not alone in this concern, Monti was certainly the first museum director to raise the issue of extending the museums’ time frame to 1918. And yet, in his presentation, he did not focus his attention on the initial question of periodization but rather on the subsequent aesthetic and epistemological issues it raised. Monti’s elaboration of these three ‘technical’ issues presented the outlines of a fascist theory of historic representation. Regarding the exhibition of photographs, Monti declared that he ‘would rather see only authentic objects exhibited, because they have an emotional and meditative impact on the viewer that photographs cannot replicate.’44 This opposition to photographs might appear at first to be a nostalgic defence of the aura of authentic objects against their modern reproducibility, a stand that would confirm Walter Benjamin’s famous definition of the fascist ‘aesthetization of politics’ as an ‘uncontrolled application of outmoded concepts.’45 And yet, in actually applying Benjamin’s discussion of the aura and its relations to fascism, we may best appreciate that the principles underpinning Monti’s proposals were much more modernist than outmoded. As he specified at length in the same lecture, Monti objected not to photographs per se but to the display by any museum of photographed documents and relics owned by another museum to fill the narrative gaps. Therefore, the authenticity he defended was not that of unique objects but of the viewer’s experience of fragmentary evidence, an experience that (in the historical museum) he considered to be both emotional and meditative and the necessary basis for the fusion of sensory visual stimuli and mental visual projections. The insertion of photographs into the display would not have necessarily signalled an abandonment of authenticity. On the contrary, the availability of the originals in other museums would have given epistemological validity to the photographs as authenticity effects. The fascist curator’s defense of the historical aura did not refer, therefore, to outmoded notions ‘such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery,’ as Benjamin implied, but to a conception of the relationship between aesthetics and historical knowledge that resonated with his Catholic sensitivity to the rhetorical encoding of presence just as much as with a quintessentially modernist critique of narrative representation.46 We could thus say – as Benjamin says of film and dadaism – that Monti’s museum aimed at meeting the viewer’s distracted mode of reception halfway. Yet, rather than allowing the visitor to assume the

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position of the absent-minded examiner through the regulated administration of shocks, Monti sought to induce a contemplation of presence by relying solely on the synaesthetic tactility of authentic objects. In fact, it is only in the light of this modernist recoding of the historical aura that we may fully understand the coherence and interrelatedness of Monti’s last two proposals: his pleas for the exhibition of nonpatriotic items and the inclusion of the Great War in the Risorgimental display. As Monti emphasized at length, the first proposal called into question the means by which Risorgimento museums had traditionally sought ‘to keep the patriotic sentiment always awake, and to strengthen national consciousness by means of examples from the past.’ In fact, he insisted, his predecessors’ fetishization of memory value had been chiefly responsible for the Risorgimental struggles’ reduction from ‘national wars’ to mere ‘conspiracies, and efforts to expel the foreigner.’47 In response to this state of affairs, he proceeded to explicate his final and most significative proposal: the criterion according to which Risorgimento museums should have included the Great War in their display. Reversing the diachronic direction of historical consciousness, Monti argued that the inclusion of the Great War was necessary in order to present the Risorgimental wars ‘in the same fashion as the recent conflict of 1915–1918,’ that is, as national wars ‘inform[ing], inspir[ing], and dominat[ing] all other manifestations of life.’48 The proposal, then, had nothing to do with the mere affirmation of that historical continuity that had inspired – during the conflict – the labelling of the Great War as the ‘fourth war of independence.’ Rather, it referred to the Gentilian notion of the Great War as having reoriented historical consciousness toward ‘history belonging to the present.’ Belonging to the ‘present’ of consciousness, the Great War event had recoded the Risorgimental wars as catalysts of national character. Accordingly, postwar Risorgimento museums should have documented and periodized the evolution of all manifestations of national virtue. Given the availability of great numbers of documents, the related problems of narrative integration (by photographs) and patriotic inspiration through fetishized examples had become not only theoretically but also practically obsolete. Eliminating these, the curatorial selection of documents and objects for display would invite the viewers to focus their narrative projection on the epochal totality of the Great War and the Risorgimento. It was therefore in the revision of Risorgimento museums – even more than in the institutionalization of its ‘thaumaturgic’ archive – that the Great War was meant to explicate its true nature as a historic event that

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had reoriented historical consciousness toward ‘history belonging to the present.’ In Risorgimento museums, the Great Event was meant to provide at one and the same time the new end point of the Risorgimental epoch, the impetus for the transformation of a fetishistic historical culture into a modernist one, and, finally, the very model to which all past and future representations of national struggle would be made to conform. In this respect, Monti’s museum also affirmed the inseparable connection between the visual representation of the past and the upkeep of a fascist historic imaginary. How far Monti went with this historic revision of historical representation we can now ascertain by exploring the implementation and diffusion of his curatorial principles.49 Toward a Historic Mode of Representation The first important element we may positively ascertain is that the epochal fusion of Great War and Risorgimento proposed by Monti did not take place in the 1920s.50 Until the mid-1930s, all Risorgimento museums in Italy, including Monti’s MRM, covered the Risorgimento from the end of the eighteenth century to 1870.51 Yet the very failure of this historiographical fusion at the level of periodization highlights the deeper connection between the Great War as ‘giant psychological fact’ and the institutionalization that the actualist philosophy of history encountered in these institutions. In fact, of all of Monti’s 1924 proposals, this one alone was not implemented by the author and his peers. The translation of ‘history belonging to the present’ into specific curatorial solutions became, instead, the hallmark of Monti’s undisputed museotechnical leadership, and was followed with the utmost attention by all of his peers just as much as by fascist authorities As Monti wrote in a 1925 memorandum addressed to the Milanese municipal government, his first curatorial operation entailed reordering the museum’s display ‘according to a chronological criterion such that each display case corresponded, as it were, to a page of history.’52 Today, we are all too accustomed to the identification of any historical representation with diachronic narrative to appreciate fully Monti’s analogy between the museum’s display cases and ‘historical pages.’ We should recall, however, that until the end of World War I, all Risorgimento museum displays were characterized by chronological confusion and overlap.53 In this respect, the only surviving photograph of the museum’s central room (Figure 1) can help us recapture some of the specificity and literalness of Monti’s first comment.

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Figure 1. The Central Hall in the Milanese Museo del Risorgimento in 1926.

This 1926 photograph purposely emphasizes the general modularity of the display. It shows diagonally the perfect alignment of flags on the left side, the display of the regular intervals among five busts, and a full view of the first display case. This case is divided into five panels documenting – with a series of regularly framed images and carefully arranged coins – the ‘Italian Campaigns from 1796 to 1800.’ The combination of diagonal depth, regular intervals, and standardized display gives a sense of orderly succession analogous to the regularity of narrative time and promises the neat pagination of events into chapters complete with distinct introductory headings. This image was more than a panoramic view of the museum’s main room: it presented readers and visitors with a hypericon that pointed simultaneously to the aesthetic distance between the new museum and its predecessors – all patriotism and fetishistic disorder – and the challenge that visual history making in the museum could now pose to written historiography. The narrative regularity of the first five rooms was in fact interrupted by the insertion of five thematic rooms in the corridor between the western and eastern wings of the museum, celebrating the regional plebiscites of 1860 and various individual contributions (Figure 2). In addition to its unorthodox stress on economists, women, and foreigners, this topical section implemented the revision of the Risorgi-

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Figure 2. Floor map of the Milanese Museo del Risorgimento, 1926.

mento after the model of the Great War that Monti had announced in 1924. The new layout characterized the Risorgimento as a ‘national war’ that had mobilized social and intellectual forces within and beyond the geographical boundaries of the nation. Framed as it was between the first narrative section, covering 1796 to 1860, and the long ‘Garibaldi Hall’ that picked up the story from 1860 to 1870, the asymmetry of the topical rooms spatially interrupted the regular time of narrative. The revolutionary press, the prophet-conspirator Mazzini, and all the other exiled writers, economists, women, and foreigners were selected, separated, and extracted from the narrative series so as to counteract the tale of the military events preceding them, while at the same time heralding the epic unity of the Garibaldian times following them. These rooms thematized an epochal ideology of historical meaning: they foregrounded in no uncertain terms the intellectual activity that had allowed military history to become, as it were, national epic.

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Monti’s equal attention to the more sensory-visual aspects of the display matched his sensitivity to the relationship between the epochal encoding of space and the codification of historical meaning in the historical museum. From the introduction of yellow glass to protect the most fragile documents and relics from the sun, to the restoration of uniforms and their exhibition on mannequins specifically designed by Monti, to the replacement of originals with facsimiles, to the design of new cases constructed specially for the preservation of fragile posters and that of passe-partouts patented by Monti himself for their exhibition, all of the museotechnical innovations diffused by Monti in the late 1920s conformed to the actualist-modernist trajectory of his curatorial principles.54 Let me colour, by way of exemplification, the only surviving picture of the MRM’s central room. The transfer of yellowness from the documents to the glass panel between document and viewer translated Monti’s reconceptualization of historical representation as related to a system-dependent notion of value and his rejection of any notion of inherent value, whether aesthetic or cognitive. The yellow glass of Monti’s display cases preserved the unique but instrumental value of each item in a spatial system that surrounded the viewer with its modularity before the gaze could engage any single item. At the same time, however, the glass called the viewer’s attention to the perishable nature of certain elements in the system and in so doing recoded the emotional appeal of age value while protecting against physical decay. The same can be said of the restored uniforms. Their bullet holes had been sewn up, thereby preventing the romantic revival of historical heroes, but their display on stylized mannequins stimulated the viewer’s anthropomorphic visualization of the surrounding objects and documents as part of lived history. Finally, and more effectively than any other element in the display, the cleaned posters and prints, uniformly framed with Monti’s passe-partouts, pointed the viewer’s attention away from their memory value and toward their narrative value as structural elements in a visual history of the Risorgimento. Let us now imagine the combined effect of documents seen through yellow glass, restored uniforms mounted on mannequins, and spotless posters and uniformly framed prints that seem brand new until one makes out their date and subject matter – all within a uniformly divided space occupied by modular show cases whose historical referent is clearly announced by overhanging labels. Clearly, the implementation of sensory distance between viewer and relic may be seen as one pole of

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Monti’s interventions, the opposite pole being the gradual reduction of this distance by the viewer’s visual experience of regulated narrative progression. Their combined effect was to make the interaction between the sensory-visual aspects of the display and the mental-visual projections of the viewer dependent on a tactical modulation of presence and narrative. All of this, Monti understatedly insisted, was simply intended ‘to let hygiene penetrate also into the rooms and onto the shelves of historical archives and museums.’55 Symptomatic or intentional, Monti’s insistence on the hygienic scope of his activities inscribed the founding futurist image of the Great War as ‘sola igiene del mondo’ (the world’s only hygiene) in the ideological framework of his thaumaturgic principles.56 In fact, this rhetorical gesture gives us a clue to the evolution of Monti’s curatorial practices in the diretion of a compenetration of Catholic rhetorics and avant-garde aesthetics. While citing explicitly the Catholic principle of invisibilia per visibilia as the prime criterion underpinning his modernization of historical representation, Monti’s museotechnical innovations were clearly marked by an acute sensitivity to the synaesthetic principles that had been posed at the foundation of futurist art – from Carlo Carrà’s La pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori (Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells), (1913) to F.T. Marinetti’s Tattilismo (Tactilism) (1921). It was in fact in participating in the development of the most avant-garde, public, and quintessentially futurist art form, exhibition art, that Monti would find the most appropriate context for inserting his history-making activities into the modernist stream of fascist image politics. Specifically, Monti was called to Rome in 1932 to set up a historical exhibition of Garibaldi and Garibaldianism (Mostra garibaldina) and to join thirty-four of Italy’s most renowned artists in the collective installation of a historical exhibition of fascism (Mostra della rivoluzione fascista). As we shall see in Chapter 5, setting up these two exhibitions allowed Monti finally to endorse avant-garde aesthetics in the elaboration and institutionalization of a historic mode of representation. Yet participating in these official initiatives also brought Monti into direct contact with another key moment in fascist ritual culture. The two exhibitions constituted, in fact, the crowning jewels of a double commemorative occasion: the fiftieth anniversary of Garibaldi’s death (cinquantenario garibaldino) in June 1932, and the tenth anniversary of the fascist revolution (decennale fascista) in October of the same year. Falling as they did at the chronological apex in the construction of both the cult of the Duce and the cult of fascism, these two anniversary celebrations

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inscribed the evolution of a historic mode of representation at the crucial nexus of negotiations between Mussolini’s aesthetic politics and the sacralization of fascism. Accordingly, I interrupt momentarily the story of Monti’s modernist gestae and, in the next three chapters, turn our attention to the organization, rhetorical encoding, and reception of the Garibaldian Celebrations, in which discussions we meet the prime protagonist in the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary, the Duce Taumaturgo, in person.

Chapter Three

HISTORIC SPECTACLE

Had it not been for the celebration of the decennale fascista, the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome, 1932 would have been remembered by most Italians as l’anno garibaldino (the Garibaldian year) in view of the commemoration of the cinquantenario garibaldino, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Italy’s most popular Risorgimental hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi. The ‘Hero of the Two Worlds,’ as Garibaldi was nicknamed after his Latin American exploits, was one of the four Risorgimental fathers of the Italian nation – along with the ‘Warrior’ King Victor Emmanuel, his ‘shrewd’ minister Camillo Benso Count of Cavour, and the ‘Republican apostle’ Giuseppe Mazzini. Garibaldi’s popularity, however, was unrivalled both at home and abroad. His was the quintessential figure of the romantic revolutionary hero, and hence a fundamental Risorgimental precursor to be included in the fascist historical pantheon. Born in Nice on 4 July 1807, Garibaldi trained his patriotism abroad fighting for the independence of Latin American nations from the early 1830s to the mid-1840s. After returning to the Italian peninsula he put his military valour and fame in the service of Mazzini’s republican ideals, participating in setting up and defending the unfortunate Roman Republic of 1847 to 1849. Chased out of Rome by French forces, Garibaldi was very nearly captured and had to go into hiding. Like most Republican patriots, he spent the next few years preparing a popular and military insurrection while waiting for the Piedmontese Monarchy to resume war against Austria. The opportunity finally came in 1860 when, with Piedmont waging war on Austria in the north, Garibaldi led a military expedition of a thousand ‘redshirts’ (from the colour of their characteristic uniforms) to a successful invasion of the southern island of Sicily. From there, Garibaldi’s forces proceeded to liberate the whole southern tip of

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the peninsula from Spanish rule and threatened to set up a Southern Italian Republic. The astounding military feat of Garibaldi’s ‘thousand’ captured the imagination of all European revolutionaries but also prompted the Piedmontese monarchy to resume its military march southwards to convince Garibaldi to annex the liberated lands to the recently declared Kingdom of Italy. With Garibaldi’s famous telegram to Victor Emmanuel, ‘I obey,’ both the Italian Risorgimento and the hopes of the Republican democratic forces led by Mazzini were stiffled. Yet this betrayal of democratic principles never stained Garibaldi’s popular image and, under fascism, became instead the stepping stone for a celebration of the protofascist gestae of the ‘Hero of the two worlds’ and of the ‘Garibaldian tradition’ created by his descendants. Beginning with two of Garibaldi’s sons, Menotti and Ricciotti Sr, the socalled Garibaldian tradition of military volunteerism saw two generations of Garibaldis and redshirts join the Balkan wars against the Ottoman Empire in 1912, intervene on the side of the Entente before the official entry of Italy in the Great War, and organize a regular ‘Garibaldi’ battalion of volunteers during the conflict itself. Over the span of four decades the Garibaldian tradition thus institutionalized itself into a veterans association and a small but symbolically powerful political movement referred to – somewhat disparagingly – as garibaldinismo (Garibaldianism). Throughout the liberal regime Garibaldianism stood squarely on the left side of the political spectrum, merging Mazzinian Republicanism, utopian socialism, and, above all, virulent anticlericalism. But with the end of the Great War and the Bolshevik threat of 1919, the Garibaldis increasingly drifted toward openly nationalist positions. Thus, in June 1922, on the highly symbolic occasion of the yearly national pilgrimage to Garibaldi’s tomb in Caprera, the last surviving son of the general, Ricciotti Sr, invited all camice rosse (redshirts) to follow the new Duce of the camice nere (blackshirts), Benito Mussolini. No wonder then that the Garibaldian celebrations of the year 1932 assumed proportions that were truly unprecedented. As part of the official program of the cinquantenario, the government financed Monti’s Mostra garibaldina (Garibaldian Exhibition), the traditional pilgrimage to Garibaldi’s tomb in Caprera, the publication of the first national edition of Garibaldi’s writings, a special issue of commemorative stamps, and a Garibaldian lottery.1 It also decreed a parliamentary commemoration before a plenary session of the two chambers, a day of celebration in all schools and universities, and another day to be set aside for public orations by prominent members of the Partito Nazionale Fas-

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cista (PNF) in the major squares of all Italian cities.2 Undoubtedly, however, the symbolic apex of the cinquantenario was an unusually long commemorative spectacle: a three-day national commemoration executed in three public ceremonies, all of which were exhaustively documented by the news media and consciously orchestrated for that purpose.3 First was the transfer on 1 June of the remains of Garibaldi’s first wife, Brazilian-born Anita Riviero, from Genoa to Rome; then, on 2 June, came the entombment of Anita’s remains in the base of a monument to be built in her memory on top of the Janiculum hill; and, finally, on the fourth, came the official inauguration of this monument by Mussolini. Given the ritual and representational wealth of these public events, the cinquantenario garibaldino constituted the regime’s most elaborate attempt to secure a properly fascist vision of the Risorgimental past, and it also found itself placed at the chronological zenith of the most vital phase of the fascist sacralization of politics, which Emilio Gentile has identified with the fateful absorption of the Risorgimental cult of the fatherland into a proper cult of fascism.4 In fact, the organization, performance, and rhetorical encoding of the Garibaldian cinquantenario could not have been more subordinated to that of the fascist decennale. Yet, on a closer reading, the very semiotic quality of this subordination reveals that the Garibaldian celebrations did not conform at all to the procedures identified by Gentile with the institutionalization of fascist religion. On the contrary, the cinquantenario-decennale ritual complex on the one hand translated into ritual language the historic mode of representation elaborated by Risorgimento museum curators such as Monti in the 1920s. On the other hand, it contributed primarily to the institutionalization of the cult of the Duce by transfiguring the thaumaturgic Duce into Mussolini the history maker. Garibaldianism between Mussolini’s Aesthetic Politics and the Cult of the Duce I believe that Garibaldi can keep gazing in that direction [the Vatican] because, today, his spirit is appeased! Not only will he not be moved, but the fascist regime will also raise a monument to Anita Garibaldi in the same area.5

Thus, in his official presentation of the Lateran Pacts to the fascist Chamber of Deputies (14 May 1929) Mussolini added insult to injury in

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responding to the Vatican’s request that Garibaldi’s monument be moved from the top of the Janiculum hill in Rome. In fact, Mussolini’s announcement that the government intended to build a monument in honour of Garibaldi’s first wife, next to the one built in 1895 in memory of the legendary hero, was a political provocation on a number of fronts. First, as Mussolini announced in his speech, the monument was to act as an explicit deterrent to an ultra-Catholic interpretation of the pacts as a licence to put the Risorgimento on trial. Second, it was meant to monumentalize the popular image of the fascist fulfilment of the Risorgimento. Last but not least, the building of a monument to Anita was also meant to reaffirm the commitment of the fascist government to rectifying the symbolic crimes of the liberal era. The very same initiative had been launched in 1905 by an inter-parliamentary committee for the 1907 celebration of the centennial of Garibaldi’s birth, but in spite of an unusual bipartisan consensus, two national competitions among fiftyseven renowned artists for the design of the monument, and a successful popular collection of funds for its construction, the enterprise had failed miserably. The monument was never built and the subscription money never returned, giving the socialist Republican press a fine opportunity to cite the episode as one more ‘scandalous symbol of parliamentary incompetence,’ of ‘delinquent speculation on the most sincere popular feelings,’ and of the ‘liberal state’s inability to honour its own martyrs.’6 From its beginning the building of a monument to Anita was thus charged with polemical overtones that emphasized both the adversarial relationship between fascist religion and Catholicism and the antithesis between the fascist cult of Risorgimento and liberal amnesia. However, the history of this monument was not to be determined by these polemical factors. Mussolini’s decision to delay the construction of the monument in order to place its inauguration at the center of the Garibaldian celebrations to be performed in June 1932 effectively defused the charge. Endowed with the ritual solemnity of a national commemoration, the construction of the monument lost its confrontational bite in exchange for a more effective exploitation of its symbolic capital. In the first place, by commemorating the Risorgimento hero via the monumentalization of his exotic and heroic wife, the regime could capitalize on the romantic relationship between Garibaldi and Anita while at the same time avoiding direct confrontation with the ambiguous and controversial aspects of Garibaldi’s political figure. Second, the monumental fulcrum enabled the fascist government to concentrate all the

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activities associated with the national commemoration in Rome and to prohibit any other provincial or spontaneous celebrations, thereby endowing the very planning of all commemorative events with a clear symbolic direction.7 Garibaldi was to be remembered and celebrated solely for his most nationalistic trait: his romantic love of Rome, which had inspired his heroic defence of the Roman Republic in 1849 and the ‘sacrifice’ of his beloved Anita.8 In this respect, the Garibaldian celebrations intended to provide a definitive closure to the nationalization not only of the Risorgimento hero per se but also of its popular cult.9 At the same time, their organization and performance was not sustained either by the syncretic or the totalitarian logic that, according to E. Gentile, marked the fascist party’s construction of the cult of fascism.10 Rather, the choice of celebrating the national hero via his wife Anita revealed a direct connection between the Garibaldian celebrations and the consolidation of ducismo, the myth-cult of Mussolini, the Duce. No other fascist precursor threatened the uniqueness and structural ambivalence of Mussolini’s image and its refraction in the Mussolinian imaginary of Italians as much as Garibaldi. As Mario Isnenghi has rightly noted, Garibaldi’s popular image was endowed with the very same ‘congenital duplicity’ that Passerini has identified in Mussolini’s, their common ‘reversibility irreducible: from rebel to man of order, from man of order to rebel, in a spiraling movement of promised or menacing potentialities.’11 In addition, by constituting ‘the prototype of the modern “protagonist”: be he movie star, television anchor, secret agent, comic book superhero, sports superstar, or politician,’12 the cultural construction of Garibaldi’s image had anticipated by several decades that culture of personality that was to sustain the collective construction of the imaginary Mussolini.13 Any direct celebration of Garibaldi would have been not only inherently unstable and open to opposing interpretations, but also a direct challenge to the historic aura that had come to surround Mussolini’s image. In fact, Mussolini made sure that the cinquantenario would contribute directly and solely to the institutionalization of his historic image. In contrast with most similar ritual events, the principal agent in the organization of the Garibaldian celebrations was neither the fascist party nor the regime in the abstract, but the Duce in person. As honorary chairman of the celebration’s organizing committee, Mussolini was not only responsible for the strategic marginalization of all non-nationalistic traits of Garibaldi’s figure – a feat achieved through the monumentalization of his wife and the centralization of the celebrations in the Eternal City – but he also personally made all choices

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regarding the aesthetic and ritual form of all commemorative events. From the timing of Mussolini’s first announcement – just ten days before his historic speech against Croce – to the decision to insert Anita’s monument at the symbolic centre of the National Commemoration, to the role he came to play at the inauguration ceremony, the Garibaldian celebrations were permeated by the signs of Mussolini’s intentional translation of fascist history making into a ritual mode of historic representation. Rather than reconsecrate the resurrected nation, fascistize patriotic religion, or incorporate the cult of Garibaldi into the cult of fascism, the cinquantenario provided a crucial nexus of negotiations between Mussolini’s aesthetic politics and the exponential growth of the popular cult of the Duce. Monumental History The first act in the planning of the national commemoration, the selection of the design for the monument, began as early as 1928. However, we can already discern in this preliminary phase two fundamental elements that would come to characterize the organization and performance of the whole spectacle: first, Mussolini’s decision to make the celebrations a personal project in which he exercised an unprecedented control over all ritual-aesthetic details; and second, a puzzling struggle between Mussolini and the appointed organizer of the celebrations, Ezio Garibaldi, over the ultimate codification of meaning in the spectacles. A faithful fascist since 1922, Ezio was also the youngest of seven living grandsons of Giuseppe Garibaldi and a war hero in his own right. Following his father, Ricciotti Sr, and his older brothers, Bruno and Costante, Ezio had been wounded during the celebrated Garibaldian expedition of the Argonne in December 1914, which Mussolini himself had defined as the most heroic episode of all in the campaign for Italy’s intervention in the Great War. In June 1922, Ezio was the sole Garibaldi grandson to openly follow his father, Ricciotti Sr, in endorsing fascism. Thus, once in power – and with Ricciotti Sr close to his deathbed (he would die in 1923) – Mussolini cemented Ezio’s support by intervening personally to secure for him a speedy military political career. In 1923, he sent Ezio to Mexico as official plenipotentiary for all economic matters, and in 1924 made him general of the fascist militia. Given this close relationship, Mussolini’s choice to entrust Ezio with the responsibility of planning the celebrations was equally instrumental in excluding the party from any decision-making role in their organization and in keep-

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Figure 3. Sciortino’s Anita (1928).

ing Ezio under his direct oversight.14 Yet the choice also meant that, through Ezio, Mussolini was to come into personal contact and conflict with the rhetorical codes that had underscored the absorption of Garibaldianism into fascism’s sacred history. Sometime between February and May of 1928, Mussolini instructed Ezio to commission an artist to make a plaster cast of the monument-tobe and to submit it to him for final approval. Ezio’s choice fell upon a relatively unknown sculptor, Antonio Sciortino.15 As the photographs and correspondence preserved in the archives of the National Federation of Garibaldian Veterans show, Ezio had asked Sciortino to represent a specific historical scene: Anita leaving the military camp of SaintSimon (in Uruguay) to search for her missing husband, her twelve-dayold son Menotti clutched to her bosom (Figure 3). This episode had taken place in 1840 when Garibaldi led a corps of international volunteers to fight on the side of the Republican forces against Argentinian and Brazilian Conservatives, and it had been

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described in detail by Garibaldi himself in a memoir published in 1872. Sciortino based his design on this firsthand account; in fact, all of his representational decisions matched Garibaldi’s narration to the letter.16 This monument, however, was never built. Mussolini not only rejected Ezio’s choice but suddenly decided to choose an artist himself. He commissioned a handful of artists to produce alternative designs, finally selecting that of the oldest, most established, and most traditional of all Italian commemorative sculptors, Mario Rutelli,17 an artist who had been acclaimed (and criticized) during the first decade of the century for the sensuality and idealized realism of his public monuments.18 In contrast to Sciortino’s historical representation, Rutelli’s first design relied on popular iconography to produce a depiction of Anita as a symbol of heroic/exotic womanhood, with no concern for historical accuracy. Yet, unlike Sciortino, Rutelli had made his Anita immediately recognizable even to the least historically informed viewer by combining a realistic rendering of her physiognomy (oval face, long hair) with clear signs of fearlessness and tumultuous passion. Anita was thus presented as a sensuous Amazon raising a gun in her right hand, astride a rearing horse, about to launch herself into battle (Figure 4). Since this heroic/exotic image of Anita corresponded to the expectations of most Italians, Mussolini’s selection of Rutelli’s monument over Sciortino’s could be seen as following an established practice according to which the regime’s choices were always dictated by the opportunistic desire to favour the work least problematic from a figurative point of view, and most likely to have an impact on the public.19 However, Mussolini was not entirely satisfied with the plaster cast he had approved, and during a personal visit to Rutelli’s studio he ordered a crucial and final modification to the monument’s design: the addition of the infant Menotti on Anita’s left arm (Figure 5).20 At first sight, the quality and unprecedented amount of Mussolini’s aesthetic policing of this monument suggests that, in reconceiving Anita, the Duce may have unwittingly given artistic expression to the autotelic essence of his aesthetic politics. In other words, Mussolini’s addition of baby Menotti disclosed that ‘narcissistic myth of the manly creator’ that Simonetta Falasca Zamponi has indicated as characterizing the virilist horizon of Mussolini’s aesthetic conception of politics.21 By giving birth to Anita’s son, Mussolini forged a seductive and static icon of fascist femininity, which conjoined the campaign against Italy’s declining birthrate and the ongoing project of fostering the formation of a warrior culture with a powerful image of fascist womanhood, the

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Figure 4. Rutelli’s plaster cast of Anita (1928).

Historic Spectacle

Figure 5. Rutelli’s Anita (1932). Note the infant Menotti resting on Anita’s left arm.

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warrior mother.22 While ultimately functioning as a patriarchal lesson to women never to abdicate their fascist femininity – that is, their childbearing role – the oxymoronic appeal of Anita as a motherly Amazon was also intended to capture the imagination – not only the historical one – of its male audience. Yet, despite its direct reference to contemporary fascist values, the modified statue also managed to refer very explicitly to the historical continuity between the military heroism of Garibaldi and his spouse, and that of his descendants and followers – in a word, to Garibaldianism. And, in this crucial respect, Mussolini’s intervention raises an issue of historical representation that lay at the centre of his aesthetic policing. Without impinging at all on the balance of Rutelli’s composition, the addition of baby Menotti detached Rutelli’s representation from its original and purely symbolic status by adding to it the referential authority of the same historical scene that Sciortino had chosen to depict in his monument. Mussolini’s appreciation of this historical scene can be related to its commemorative value: next to the signified of heroic motherhood, the modified image also established a metonymic association between Anita and Garibaldianism. But what then prompted Mussolini in the first place to reject Ezio’s initial choice of Sciortino’s Anita, which depicted the very same historical referent he later imposed on Rutelli’s design? If we compare Rutelli’s final monument to Sciortino’s plaster cast the only plausible answer to the question is that, in this case, Mussolini’s aesthetic politics were also based on a discriminating concern for the symbolic values produced by different modes of historical representation. The general public had no difficulty recognizing the mother-warrior Anita Garibaldi, thanks to Rutelli’s exploitation of some of her most popularized iconographic traits: the long hair flying behind her, the Colt gun in her right hand, and the feminine side-saddle riding posture. Furthermore, the relationship between the equestrian group and the two historical scenes depicted by Rutelli in the lateral bas-reliefs on the monument’s base, both of which referred to episodes immediately preceding and following Anita’s flight from the military camp of SaintSimon, enhanced the narrative value of the image.23 With the addition of the babe in arms, then, Mussolini had effectively pushed Rutelli’s symbolic representation toward the Riegelian notion of historical value and the narrative aesthetics of nineteenth-century historical realism. In contrast to Rutelli’s design, Sciortino’s monument was not immediately

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forthcoming in disclosing its historical subject: Anita’s facial features were only suggested, and none of the traditional iconographic signs associated with her figure was inscribed in the model. Therefore, despite its faithfulness to Garibaldi’s historical account, Sciortino’s monument pushed its historical message – Anita’s courageous motherhood – into the background, thereby entrusting the monument’s meaning entirely to the appeal generated by its modernist aesthetics. Indeed, compared to Rutelli’s ‘historical’ Anita, Sciortino’s rejected altogether the Riegelian notion of historical value and proposed instead a sculptural model of historic representation. Without renouncing the main tenets of sculptural realism, Sciortino attempted a modernist amalgamation of age and newness that gave his Anita a powerful appeal to unmediated sensory perception.24 On the one hand, the weathered appearance of the human figures and the lines of erosion, which were visible in the simulated ground at the horse’s feet, evoked the appeal of Riegelian age value. On the other hand, the compositional structure of Sciortino’s work, specifically its novel approach to the classic equestrian statue, claimed newness value. Possibly inspired by the equestrian groups of leading modernist sculptor Duilio Cambellotti, whose works he continued to emulate throughout the 1930s,25 Sciortino replaced the static equine posture found in traditional commemorative monuments with the extremely dynamic pose of Anita’s horse. The representation of movement and speed, one of the most distinguishing traits of futurist aesthetics, was accomplished through the artist’s decision to represent the horse’s run in the last suspended moment of galloping, a composition that also evoked that quintessentially modern mode of representation, the cinematic still. This monument, with its mixing of indications of age and cinematic dynamism, attempted to arouse in the viewer a modernist perception of time – a mixture of Bergsonian duration and élan vital – that gave immanent status to its historical referent.26 Sciortino’s Anita was meant to stand for the dynamic immanence of a unique revolutionary tradition: garibaldinismo.27 It suspended this tradition between an absolute past and an absolute future, thereby encoding Garibaldianism with the historic appeal of everlasting presence. In other words, Sciortino’s Anita translated Gentile’s catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act in a plastic representation of Garibaldianism belonging to the present. It was therefore this historic representation and interpretation of Garibaldianism that Mussolini first rejected and then sought to repress

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by historicizing Rutelli’s monument. The addition of historical value to Rutelli’s idealized realism fixed Garibaldianism in a static and feminine icon that purposely prevented the monumentalization of a competitive and appealing signified: the dynamism and historical immanence of garibaldinismo. Thus, the struggle between Mussolini and Ezio over the historical codification of Anita’s monument reveals the contours of a proper contest over the codification of the fascist historic imaginary. In fact, Mussolini’s aesthetic policing of Anita actively counteracted the epochal assimilation of fascism and Garibaldianism, which had come to constitute not only Ezio’s most cherished ideological project as selfappointed leader of the Garibaldian tradition, but also one of the most solid and popular components of fascist historical discourse. On the death of his father, Ricciotti Sr, Ezio found himself isolated when his elder brothers, Ciotti and Peppino, chose to defy the fascistization of the Garibaldian tradition and proceeded to organize a militantly antifascist association of Garibaldian veterans in France. For several years, Ciotti’s organization proved to be a nuisance for the young fascist government, for it openly sought to preserve the association of Garibaldi’s name with notions of direct action, republicanism, voluntarism, Freemasonry, socialism, and political leftism in general. However, its existence also made Ezio’s political fortune. In order to silence Ciotti, Mussolini not only invited Ezio to join the PNF and personally sustained his military parliamentary career, but he also financed Ezio’s political journal, Camicia Rossa,28 as well as Ezio’s unification of three generations of Italian garibaldini in a single organization: the National Federation of Garibaldian Veterans.29 From this solid institutional basis Ezio worked unsparingly and successfully to propose Garibaldianism as the living sign of historical continuity in a context including the Risorgimento, interventionism, the Great War, and fascism. His organization sought to affirm in every symbolic way the historical connections among the volunteers who had followed his grandfather in his Risorgimental campaigns, those who had followed his father and uncles toward the glory of Domokos (1912), those who had joined him and his brothers in the heroic defence of France before the official Italian entry into World War I, those who had formed the Garibaldi Battalion during the conflict, all Italian soldiers who had fought and died in the war, and all the war veterans who had supported the fascist rise to power after the war. Yet, in the process, Ezio had also come to propagandize a daring conception of Garibaldianism as the political vanguard of fascism.30 Most plausibly, then, with the threat of

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antifascist Garibaldianism rendered negligible,31 it was Ezio’s attempt to give monumental form to the ‘assumption of a parallel dynasty called upon to embody and lead – generation after generation – the “immanent” function of Garibaldianism’ that stimulated Mussolini’s personal and sustained engagement with the Garibaldian celebrations.32 In fact, the replacement of Sciortino’s historic Anita with Rutelli’s historical scene was to be only the first act of the continuing struggle between Mussolini and Ezio that we are about to observe over the semiotic codification of the National Commemoration itself. This ritual phase of the cinquantenario contained three separate scenes: the transfer of Anita’s body from Genoa to Rome, its entombment in the base of the veiled monument, and the monument’s unveiling ceremony. Yet, in this final act, Mussolini did not limit himself to containing Ezio’s historic agenda but also put forward one of his own. Indeed, the following analysis of the National Commemoration proves that Mussolini’s symbolic repression of Garibaldianism in the choice of the monument’s design was not merely the product of a personal competition with Ezio Garibaldi. Rather, it constituted the preliminary segment of a complex rhetorical strategy aimed at producing a unique and coordinated historic spectacle. History on Parade: The Genoese Homage Let us start with Mussolini’s direction of the first scene: the parade that was to convey Anita’s remains from the Genoese cemetery of Staglieno to the local train station on 1 June 1932. In a letter dated 19 May 1932, Ezio had made a series of requests designed to regain some of the symbolic capital lost earlier in the struggle over the selection of the monument. As before, Mussolini would not cooperate. In response to Ezio’s requests he refused to allow the on-air radio broadcast of the Genoese ceremony. He also denied a request that Anita’s coffin be conveyed on a gun carriage; he prohibited the Garibaldian veterans who would mount an honour guard over the coffin from bearing arms or sharing with the regular military the honour of being on duty to control public order. Finally, he did not permit the train that was to carry Anita’s body from Genoa to Rome to make any stops before its intended destination.33 The symbolic referent of Mussolini’s denials can be readily ascertained. Ezio’s requests harked back to the most successful national ritual ever performed in the pre-fascist era: the 1921 burial of the Unknown Soldier in the Altare della Patria (Altar to the Fatherland), the monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome. Following a proposal made by the

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Garibaldian Colonel Luigi Douhet, the last non-fascist government had entrusted the Roman association of Garibaldian veterans with the organization of this ritual. On that occasion, the train transporting the Unknown Soldier from the northern town of Aquileia to Rome had stopped at every station along its route and, once in Rome, the coffin had been escorted on a gun carriage by armed Garibaldian veterans to its monumental site.34 Therefore, by refusing to allow Anita’s coffin to be similarly transported, Mussolini sought to deny that metonymic relationship between Anita and immanent Garibaldianism that Ezio had earlier attempted to monumentalize through Sciortino’s design. This time, however, a more strategic intention also animated Mussolini’s decisions: they were intended to assign the whole Genoese spectacle an appropriate symbolic position in relation to the Roman celebrations that were to follow. The spectacle was meant to offer a period of respectful silence and mourning, but one limited in time and space rather than extended to the whole nation – or even to the communities along the path of the train carrying Anita toward Roman resurrection. In fact, the whole Genoese spectacle was specifically meant to stimulate the narrative memory of its audience by means of its aesthetics so as to ensure the symbolic historicization of garibaldinismo as a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Responding to Mussolini’s express directions, the core of the parade that accompanied the precious coffin was organized to look like the central room of a Risorgimento museum. Framed between the municipal valets (dressed in their historical uniforms) and the funeral carriage, the Garibaldians, all dressed up in their glorious red shirts, riding on open, horse-drawn carriages – and separated from both the blackshirts and the World War I veterans who followed the carriage – were put on display as living relics of Garibaldi’s time. The parade’s implicit codification of this memory-time was then reinforced by another coup de théâtre devised by Mussolini himself: Anita’s coffin was carried in a solemnly decorated funeral carriage pulled by four black horses (Figure 6).35 The syncretic combination of living relics and horse-drawn carriage could not have referred more explicitly to the popular memory of nineteenth-century funerals. Indeed, as the local newspapers’ accounts indicate, the parade’s aesthetics determined the reception of this mass spectacle as a Risorgimento museum in motion.36 Il Lavoro described the parade’s path to the station as a visual narrative of the Risorgimento itself, moving from an ‘animated and polychromatic

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Figure 6. The Genoese funeral parade.

painting recalling the atmosphere of 1848,’ to a ‘monochromatic and conciliatory passage before the imposing statues of the Prophet [Giuseppe Mazzini] the Gentleman King [Victor Emmanuel II] and the Liberator [Giuseppe Garibaldi],’ to a final ‘macchiaiolo scene’37 inscribing in the event the post-unification phase of mourning, disillusion, and memory. The account of another newspaper, Il Secolo XIX, stressed the role of aesthetics in determining the emotional response of the parade’s spectators. It recorded repeatedly the abrupt alternation between silence at the passing of the solemn carriage and loud cheers at the passage of the Garibaldians, thereby matching Il Lavoro’s laconic description of the parading redshirts: ‘In five carriages, each pulled by two horses, here come the glorious old Garibaldians. Old, truly old, and tremulous, with their eyes fogged by the passing of time, survivors who have gone beyond their red shirts, their wounds, their medals, their far dreams of youth and glory: and yet, in all of them, the living memory of those distant days.’ No other words could have better highlighted the Garibaldians’ representational status as living relics of the nineteenth century. Their horse-drawn carriages – themselves relics of a time gone by – put them on display, thereby detaching them from the historical painting they had initially

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animated. The hyperbolic reiteration of their senility enhanced their age value. Finally, their historical value as relics was doubled because they themselves served as witnesses to their own relic-hood. The press accounts of the Genoese parade testify to the success of Mussolini’s stripping of Garibaldianism’s military symbolism and metonymic association with Anita. They also show how Mussolini was able to frustrate Ezio’s attempt to cancel the symbolic distance between the redshirts and the privileged martyrs of the new fatherland, the World War I veterans, and the blackshirts. This rhetorical operation resulted from the combined effect of Mussolini’s instructions, the parade’s construction of a visual narrative, and the only proper rite performed during the parade’s progress to the station: the minute of silence and the attenti! (on your guard!) ordered by the leader of a fascist youth squad as the carriage passed before the local monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi. Contrary to the prime fascist ritual known as the appello (roll call) – which sought to symbolize a mystical communion among the ritual actor, the onlooking masses, and the honoured martyr – the ritual of the attenti codified the very distance between a present that paid homage and a past that received that homage. The public performance of this ritual thus fixed the link between the Genoese parade and the national commemoration of Garibaldi’s death while at the same time encoding an incommensurable distance between fascist present and Garibaldian past. Indeed, the association of Garibaldianism with a past to be honoured as historical, and only as such, was definitively enacted in the parade’s passage through the Arco in onore dei caduti, Genoa’s triumphal arch recently built in memory of her dead in the Great War (Figure 7). Only the ‘historical’ section of the parade – that is, the municipal valets, the funeral carriage, the members of the Garibaldi family, and the redshirts – passed through the arch. The others, including blackshirts and World War I veterans, were ordered to proceed to the station by another route. As the municipal monthly Genova aptly put it, this careful choreography allowed onlookers to direct their thoughts toward ‘an ideal point, the heroism of two distinct generations that have both devoted their entire existence to the unification of the Fatherland’:38 the redshirts – passing through the arch – and the World War I veterans – taking a separate path to the station. These were two generations whose historical value was symbolically connected to a common historical task – the unity of the fatherland. This was a task, however, that the parade’s aesthetics and the ritual homage to Garibaldi had already encoded as a nineteenth-

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Figure 7. The Genoese parade passing through the Arco in onore dei caduti.

century accomplishment, thereby marginalizing the idea of a living continuity between fascism and Garibaldianism. The resonant accord between Mussolini’s policing of Anita’s monument and his staging of the Genoese parade suggests the common reference of both events to Mussolini’s awareness of the semiotics associated with different modes of historical representation. In both cases, Mussolini’s control of the aesthetics of historical representation was aimed at enhancing the historical value of specific signifieds while seeking to detach them from their reference to traditional conceptions of historical progress or development, in order to prevent the perception of historical continuity between fascist present and Garibaldian past. In this respect, the rhetorical complexity and consistency of Mussolini’s separation of Garibaldianism, the Great War, and the fascist present raises some crucial questions concerning the interpretation of fascist ritual culture from the perspective of the sacralization of politics. According to this perspective, most forcefully sustained by Emilio

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Gentile, the Garibaldian celebrations should have crowned the phase of maximum ritual effort (1926–1932) in the absorption of the cult of the Risorgimento into the cult of fascism, and confirmed the totalitarian logic that regulated the circularity of myth, ritual, and symbol in fascist culture.39 In 1932, however, there was not one public oration or newspaper article that did not refer explicitly to the already institutionalized myth of the ideal/spiritual/mystical connections among the redshirts of Garibaldi, the veterans of the Great War, and the blackshirts of Mussolini. Above all, there had been no official acts, either by Mussolini’s government or the Fascist Party and its organizations, which had been aimed at censuring or discrediting the public codification of historical continuity between Garibaldianism and fascism. Nor had there ever been any serious objection to the institutionalization of such a myth as a living historical tradition with its legitimate representative leader, Ezio, its own constituency, the veterans, and also its contemporary signified, volunteerism. Therefore, Mussolini’s control over symbol and ritual counteracted a myth of continuity between Garibaldianism and fascism that had been actively encouraged, culturally codified, and deliberately institutionalized at all levels of fascist discourse and historiography. The microhistory of the cinquantenario, then, does not simply modify the scenario of fascist religion by casting Garibaldianism as the neverincorporated tradition in the fascist absorption of the cult of the fatherland.40 On a historiographical plane, Mussolini’s history-making involvement in the organization of all commemorative events suggests that the cinquantenario represented a crucial point of ideological intersection between the evolution of Mussolini’s aesthetic politics and the historic imaginary he evoked in his 1929 speech. On a related theoretical plane, the close reading of Mussolini’s representational strategy also reveals that there existed no totalitarian circularity between the discursive codification of myth and the visual encoding of symbol and ritual in fascist spectacles. The microhistorical analysis of the cinquantenario suggests instead that in fascist culture word and image were often at odds with each other and that the ‘politics of enthusiasm’ generated by and related to the growing cult of the Duce often undermined the ‘politics of consensus’ pursued by the fascist party. In other words, Mussolini’s aesthetic politics constituted not only a constant and undermining adversary to the party’s attempts to institutionalize the cult of fascism, but, in the case of the Garibaldian celebrations, they also sought to contribute specifically to a fusing of fascism with the image of the historic

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Duce – a feat that we may begin to observe in the Roman parade that accompanied Anita to the monumental site of her fascist resurrection. The Roman Apotheosis The second scene of the National Commemoration, which opened in Rome on 2 June with the arrival of Anita’s coffin at Termini station, was characterized by a complete restructuring of the rhetorical strategy that underpinned the Genoese parade. Every aspect of the Roman event, from the aesthetics and structure of the parade, to the ritual performed, to the absorption of the viewers into the spectacle, was carefully planned to function as an antithesis to the Genoese codification of memory as mourning and homage. In addition, Mussolini not only continued to play an exclusive role in the planning of Anita’s burial and monumental rebirth, but he also took centre stage in the performance of both events. Responding to his precise directions as well as to his actual presence on the spot, the Roman parade provided a most striking contrast to that nineteenth-century picturesque and polychromatic painting evoked by the Genoese parade-in-the-making. While the general public was not allowed to attend the arrival of the coffin at Termini Station, over ten thousand members of thirty-five fascist associations, including a mixed contingent of Garibaldian and World War I veterans, were ordered to assemble in discrete groups at specific places between the station and Piazza Esedra, so as to proceed in synchronic and spiralling movement to the formation of the parade. (Figure 8) Indeed, as the maps and accounts published by most Roman newspapers attest, Mussolini’s plan for the parade’s formation, and his own physical presence during this initial segment of the commemorative event, were key to the semiotic encoding of its aesthetics.41 Performed exclusively for its own actors, this spectacle was intended to foster in all a sense of partaking in the symbolic representation of the cominginto-being of the fascist movement. Its constitution was portrayed as depending on a magnetic fulcrum (Mussolini) just as much as on the synchronic and orderly manner of its formation. Once the formation of the fascist movement had been depicted, Mussolini departed, leaving behind an enthusiastically charged crowd, a collective fascist subject, as it were, ready to function as a magnet for the larger, unorganized crowds it encountered on its path toward its final destination, Rutelli’s veiled monument on the Gianicolo.

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Figure 8. Map with the instructions for the formation of the Roman parade.

Once again, the press accounts of the event provide us with an invaluable indication of how much the parade’s aesthetic was built on the assumption of a rhetorical literacy of codes shared by all performing agents: Mussolini, the fascist organizations, the crowds, and the mass media. Emphasizing the interaction between the parade and its spectators, La Tribuna (3 June 1932) described the narrative transformation of its collective subject. From ‘a river flowing between banks which can hardly contain it,’ the parade was presented as turning into a sort of inverted ‘river flooded by its own banks,’ until it became ‘a slow moving mass ... A long, most continuous wave. One that appears to have no end.’ Beyond the journalistic rhetoric, the Roman newspapers depicted

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Figure 9. The Roman parade passing through Via Nazionale.

the allegorical thrust of the Roman parade as a historical representation of the fascist movement becoming a mass movement. In so doing, these accounts illustrated the rhetorical gap between the Genoese homage and the Roman apotheosis. Rather than stressing the symbolic distance between present and past earlier codified in the Genoese parade, the Roman parade was solely concerned with representing the abolition of this distance in the development of fascism from ‘movement’ to ‘regime,’ and in the development of its collective subject from ‘fascist subject’ to ‘fascist mass subject’ (Figure 9). Nowhere was the symbolic gap between the two parades more evident than in the ritual performed before the entombment of Anita’s coffin: that is, the appello that had not been performed in front of the Genoese crowd. In the first years of the regime, the roll call had been performed only at funerals of fascists killed in action. On such occasions the leader of the squad would call out the dead man’s name, and the assembled crowd would bellow ‘presente!’ (‘here!’). In time, however, the appello had evolved into the supreme fascist rite, being performed for all those ‘who had distinguished themselves in the revolution or in national life.’42 In contrast to the Genoese ‘On your guard!’ which had rein-

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forced the parade’s ties to nineteenth-century narrative memory and mourning, the Roman roll call translated historic semantics into ritual form by inscribing a proper ‘scene of enàrgeia’ at the heart of this celebratory act. In fact, the performance of this ritual was rhetorically connected to the parade’s narrative encoding. While the parade had proposed the formation of the fascist mass subject as its sole representational signified, the ritual of the appello attributed to this subject the active function of signifying the real presence of Anita (history) in the present. Obviously, this was a presence that Ezio Garibaldi’s call made all the more intuitively physical, real, and present, but it was also a presence so rhetorically encoded as to leave no doubt about its structural rhetoricity. It was, in fact, the parade’s narrative subject that answered ‘presente!’ to Ezio’s shout ‘Anita Garibaldi!’ In so doing, it was the fascist mass subject that obliterated the residual distance between itself and the past it revived, simultaneously signifying its own presence as historic agent.43 With the Roman parade of 2 June 1932, the Garibaldian celebrations began to reveal the historic encoding that had underwritten their whole organization. While the initial repression of Garibaldianism in the monument’s design and in the Genoese homage had been rhetorically subordinated to the necessary representation of fascism as the historic agent that made the Garibaldian past present, the Roman parade revolved around the narrative construction of this agent. In other words, the Roman parade was unconcerned with either the construction or repression of a specific signified and was solely intended to represent the constitution of fascism as a historic agent. Only after having been manifested by such a historic agent could the Garibaldian past be given meaning in its relationship to the present. This, indeed, was the task assigned to the third and final segment of the celebrations, the unveiling of Anita’s monument on 4 June 1932. It comes as no surprise to learn that Mussolini orchestrated this final scene of the cinquantenario so as to present himself as the literal embodiment of fascist historic agency, and bring to a proper close the historic representation of Garibaldianism. As we shall see in the next chapter, the historic speech which the Duce delivered at the monument’s inauguration disclosed the ultimate aim of the celebrations’ rhetorical strategy: to highlight the enàrgeia of Mussolini’s historic speech and contrast it to the inert aesthetics of Rutelli’s historical monument. Yet this feat was no longer the product of Mussolini’s rhetorical policing. In the

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inauguration ceremony a new protagonist took centre stage next to Mussolini – the mass media. The final act of the cinquantenario revealed that, behind the rhetorical complexity of Mussolini’s strategy, and between its realization and reception, there stood no thaumaturgic Duce or master semiotician but that diffused literacy of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes that had sustained the formation of the fascist historic imaginary in the first place.

Chapter Four

THE HISTORIC IMAGINARY AND THE MASS MEDIA

6 June 1932 Your Excellency, I have not been able to resist the compulsion that has possessed me and driven me to tell you how deeply stunned and dumbfounded I am after reading your speech in honour of Anita Garibaldi, in which, speaking of things very well known and often profaned, you have been able to be ingeniously original, to say things, and express judgments, and draw conclusions, whose existence not even the most authoritative Risorgimento scholars had ever suspected. For the Duce and the fatherland. Raffaele Cotugno1

This is the text of a letter written by a citizen of Trani, Raffaele Cotugno, and addressed to Mussolini the day after the inauguration of the monument to Anita. At first glance, this brief eulogy of Mussolini’s inaugural speech is not very different from the many letters spontaneously addressed to the Duce on similar occasions by anonymous fascist subjects. Cotugno’s references to the ‘ingenious originality,’ ‘expressiveness,’ and ‘ultra-authoritative’ style of Mussolini’s speech confirm the oratory effectiveness of the fascist leader celebrated by most contemporaries. The hyperbolic ‘stunning’ to which the letter’s author confesses adds little to what we already know about the mass appeal of Mussolini’s ‘oxymoronic formulations’ and the ideological force of his ‘antirhetorical rhetoric.’2 Yet the singular placement of this letter in the archival binder at the Italian Central State Archive labelled celebrazioni garibaldine suggests that its value as historical evidence may approach that of a relic. This letter was in fact the sole document stored in the last unmarked folder of the archival binder, coming right after another folder labelled ‘Various,’ which

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contained three other letters that all echoed Cotugno’s in describing their authors’ emotional reaction to the inauguration ceremony and speech. Why, then, was Cotugno’s letter – so similar to the others in content – stored in a separate unmarked folder? Why, in other words, was it put so much in evidentia in so bureaucratic an environment as the folder of a state archive?3 What demanded the singular placement of Cotugno’s letter could not have been the prestige of its author (a school teacher) or the rhetorical flair of its praise, but was likely the principal element that distinguished this letter from the other three: Cotugno’s absence from the event. In fact, the compulsion that motivated Cotugno to write came from his reading the speech in a newspaper on 5 June, and therefore resonated loudly with a central element in Mussolini’s staging of the inauguration ceremony: the invitation of seventy-five journalists to the event.4 Such an invitation shows unequivocally that the Duce intended to give this event the greatest amplification that could be afforded by means of the written press.5 Unlike the Genoese and Roman parades, the final scene of the Garibaldian celebrations was not organized primarily for its actual audience, but rather for mass media reproduction. Read against the background of Mussolini’s stage directions, we may infer that the evidentia accorded to Cotugno’s letter in the archival record of the celebrations was related specifically to its singular status as ‘witness’ to Mussolini’s successful encoding of the final act of the celebrations. As historical evidence, however, the very resonance between Mussolini’s stage directions and the singular placement of this document yields more than a solitary clue to the effectiveness of Mussolini’s aesthetic policies. Suggesting that at the historic fulcrum of the celebrations a new protagonist, the mass media, had taken central stage, Cotugno’s letter issues an unavoidable methodological invitation. It prompts us to shift discursive pace and analytic approach in searching for that ever-elusive answer to the question of mass reception. Suspending momentarily our shuttling between archival sources and media accounts, we take a seat among the thousands of Cotugnos who witnessed Mussolini’s speech-event through the scene of enàrgeia encoded in the front pages of Italian newspapers. Historic Speech on Paper The panorama offered by all national, local, and provincial newspapers between 4 June and 6 June 1932 was one of striking homogeneity: with-

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out a single exception, accounts of the monument’s inauguration and the full text of Mussolini’s speech entirely occupied their front pages, with particular emphasis given to the speech text. All newspapers referred to the speech in the headlines, highlighted it typographically in their layout, and separated it from the narrative account of the inauguration ceremony.6 On the basis of a sample analysis of forty-five front pages, the graphic range of variation in this contrast can be schematized as ranging from a maximum of emphasis in Il Popolo d’Italia – where the text of the speech occupied two large (double size) columns at the centre of the page and appeared reproduced in bold, capitalized, and large characters – to a more moderate highlighting by means of a title in bold and italicized text in the vast majority of newspapers.7 That the publication and highlighting of Mussolini’s speeches was standard practice not only for Il Popolo d’Italia but for all national dailies does not diminish in the least the rhetorical significance of this media tidal wave. On the contrary, the very invitation of seventy-five journalists to the ceremony suggests that Mussolini was not simply interested in the mass diffusion of his speech – which he could have easily achieved by relying on the Stefani Agency’s routine transmission of his word to all newspapers – but in its reception and mass media recoding in relationship to the monument and the inauguration ceremony as a whole.8 In fact, beneath their apparent homogeneity, the front pages of all Italian newspapers present a variety of imagetexts, close reading and comparison of which allows us to go a step beyond decoding Mussolini’s aesthetic politics through individual press accounts such as those of the Genoese and Roman parades.9 Whereas a significant homogeneity can be identified in the typographic highlighting of Mussolini’s speech, the foremost difference amongst the front pages of the various newspapers was found in their accounts of the inauguration ceremony. The number of original accounts and the variety among them was not as large as the number of invited journalists might have suggested. In fact, despite Mussolini’s invitation, the majority of Italian newspapers reprinted the account that the Stefani Agency distributed immediately after the end of the ceremony, and some others printed a shorter text sent out later by the same agency. Of the forty-five newspapers of my sample (Appendix) only sixteen published original accounts, twenty-five used the first Stefani account (text 1), and four used the second text (text 2).10 The first element emerging from the analysis is the great disproportion in the reprinting of the two accounts disseminated by the Stefani Agency.

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This quantitative difference can be safely attributed to procedural delays. However, what makes it relevant is the very fact that the choice between, and availability of, both Stefani accounts neither prevented nor anticipated the typographical and narrative encoding of front pages. With a closer reading the insertion and modification of these two accounts in different page layouts reveals the signs of a complex rhetorical strategy. Among the newspapers that reprinted either of the two accounts, no significant differences can be identified in either the titles or the graphic highlighting of the speech. Both Stefani texts, therefore, were equally suited to give emphasis to Mussolini’s speech. In addition, by comparing the narrative content of the two Stefani accounts to the sixteen original ones, there emerges a further element of homogeneity. All accounts – beyond any other differences in length, narrative style, descriptive details, and rhetorical flair – reported very explicitly and with almost the same phrasing three episodes in the ceremony: (a) Mussolini’s call for the last surviving drummer of the Piedmontese Army to step forward from the midst of the redshirts, so that all might hear his drumming; (b) the royal couple’s invitation to the entire Garibaldi family to join them in the royal stand; and (c) the queen’s ringing of a silver bell, or pushing of an electric button, right before the unveiling of the monument. The ubiquitous appearance of these episodes in all accounts of the inauguration ceremony – including the original, non-Stefani ones – underlines not only the factual accuracy of the Stefani accounts but also, and in particular, the unanimous reception by the press of the symbolic significance of the three episodes. Their staging constitutes the clearest evidence of Mussolini’s intention to dramatize a new signified, not encoded in either the Genoese or the Roman parade: the historic(al) conciliation between monarchy and revolution. At the same time, the very fact that the three episodes were reported in all accounts of the ceremony suggests that the success of the operation was entirely dependent on the common rhetorical literacy that still connected the ex-journalist Benito Mussolini to his intellectual cohort, a suggestion that is further reinforced by the fact that – without any specific indication from the Stefani Agency – more than half of the twenty-nine papers that published either text 1 or 2 inserted under their headlines one or the other of only two sentences extracted from the speech. The first sentence, quoted by four newspapers, was a crucial passage in the speech in which Mussolini explicitly sanctioned the continuity between blackshirts and redshirts: ‘The blackshirts – who knew how to fight and sacrifice their lives during the time of [our] political humilia-

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tion – share with the redshirts and their leader a political ideal.’ The other passage, printed in eleven headlines, was the final image in Mussolini’s speech: ‘As long as the Hero’s statue dominates the top of this hill, the fate of our Fatherland will be strong and secure.’ At first sight, the referents of these two passages may appear to be rather predictable. However, seen in the context of Mussolini’s aesthetic policing of all previous events, their highlighting via the mass media reveals a common rhetorical denominator: the repression of Anita’s monument as a historical signifier through an emphasis on Mussolini’s words as endowed with proper enàrgeia. The first quotation highlighted Mussolini’s affirmation of that very continuity between redshirts and blackshirts that he had repressed in the choice of Anita Garibaldi’s monument and in the Genoese ceremony. The phrase, however, was extrapolated from a long paragraph in which Mussolini’s speech – directly addressing the sovereigns – insisted on the historical continuity between the Garibaldians and the soldiers of World War I. Detaching the quotation from both Mussolini’s rhetorical address to the sovereigns and the narrative context that preceded it, the headlines highlighted only the aesthetic appeal of the image (the identity of blackshirts and redshirts) in direct reference to the emotional appeal of manly sacrificial death and in implicit contrast to the competitive signified of heroic motherhood explicitly encoded in the monument. The choice and highlighting of this passage also referred, therefore, to the speech’s representational overshadowing of Anita’s monument. This point was reinforced further by the numerous newspapers that included in their headlines the final sentence of Mussolini’s speech. The second quoted passage referred to Giuseppe Garibaldi’s monument on the Janiculum Hill and not to Rutelli’s Anita just inaugurated before everyone’s eyes!11 The analysis of the most relevant quantitative sample of front pages (the twenty-nine that printed and modified the Stefani texts 1 and 2) suggests very strongly that, in modulating by typographical and narrative ‘framing’ the relationship between Mussolini’s speech, the ceremony, and the monument, the press responded to and sought to recode the relationship between ‘the visual’ and ‘the discursive’ in the inauguration spectacle. In other words, the press used all means at its disposal – narrative selection, page layouts, and headlines – to represent not the event itself but rather Mussolini’s rhetorical strategy. In the first place, by explicit or implicit contrast, the newspapers put Mussolini’s speech in evidentia as the sole representational event of the inauguration cere-

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mony. Second, the ceremony’s signifieds were represented as entirely independent from those encoded in Anita Garibaldi’s monument, while Mussolini the orator was presented as the sole historic signifier – in the active sense of giver of meaning – of national history.12 Without exception, therefore, the newspapers highlighted the ways in which the whole ceremony had been orchestrated to stage a contest between the ‘historical’ encoding of the monument and the ‘historic’ one of the speech and, through this staging, allow the latter to attach a whole new signified to Garibaldianism: namely, the anticipation of the conciliation between revolution and monarchy accomplished by fascism. To check the strength of these conclusions we need only turn to the most qualitatively relevant sample: the two newspapers that published both original accounts and original photographs of the inauguration on 5 June.13 Not surprisingly, these newspapers were the Secolo XIX and Il Popolo di Roma – the very dailies that had published the most detailed accounts of the Genoese and Roman parades, respectively. Their accounts of the unveiling ceremony offer both the most ‘factual’ record of the event at our disposal and a uniquely authoritative resource for the analysis of its rhetorical recoding for mass consumption. In fact, their earlier response to the different rhetorical encoding of the parades makes a comparison of their decoding of the inauguration ceremony relevant to the analysis not only of this final act but also of its relationship to the entire commemorative spectacle. Unequivocally, the headlines of both newspapers emphasized Mussolini’s speech. The Secolo XIX inserted the much-reprinted quotation from the speech’s last sentence – ‘As long as the Hero’s statue dominates the top of this hill, the fate of our Fatherland will be strong and secure’ – right under its headline, ‘The figures of Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi evoked by the supreme word of the Duce.’ Il Popolo di Roma inserted the other most-quoted passage – ‘The blackshirts, who knew how to fight and sacrifice their lives during the time of [our] political humiliation, share with the redshirts and their leader a political ideal’ – below the headline, ‘The Duce inaugurates the monument to Anita Garibaldi on the Gianicolo.’ Then, right below the printed quote, both newspapers inserted a large, centre-page photograph. In both cases, the picture showed the entirety of the unveiled monument. Yet, in both cases, the monument was not only shown in the photograph’s background, but was also pushed to a rhetorical background by the captions. In the photograph published by Il Popolo di Roma the monument’s image was technically poor. It appeared in the background, slightly out

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of focus and pulled toward the extreme left side of the frame. The four walking figures appearing in the lower right corner instead occupied the photograph’s technical focus. None of them looked directly at the monument: the king (left) and Ezio Garibaldi (right) looked at one another, Mussolini’s head (centre foreground) was turned toward the king, and the queen (centre background) looked straight at the camera. Finally, the L-shaped cropping of the photograph and its captions further pushed this technical focus to the foreground of the reader’s at-tention. With a laconic ‘from left to right: the King, the Queen, the Duce, and Ezio Garibaldi,’ the picture’s caption excluded the monument from the reader’s horizon of reception. Consequently, and without a hint of rhetorical flair, the caption added to the photograph’s technical repression of the monument a further suppression of its enàrgeia. The only presence boldly affirmed was that of the four protagonists. The monument’s image, pushed already into a ghostly background, disappeared completely from the semiotic plane of the spectacle. The relationship between the picture and caption published by the Secolo XIX was comparatively more complex and more deeply rhetorical. This Genoese daily published a photograph in which the image of the monument, rendered in all its vividness by the interplay between light and shade, occupied more than three-quarters of the entire photograph. In its lower right corner, in the middle ground, was the dais, where Ezio Garibaldi stood next to Mussolini, who was reading his speech. Yet neither the monument nor Mussolini provided the picture’s foreground. In the lower centre-left portion of the photograph we find the technical as well as rhetorical focus of the picture: four attentive listeners standing, effectively contrasted against the clear background of the monument’s pedestal.14 The caption reads: ‘The monument in honour of the heroine is freed from its veil: the Duce speaks.’ In this imagetext created by photograph and caption we recognize another classic ‘scene of enàrgeia.’ Without any direct reference to the picture’s technical focus, the caption nonetheless pushed the four listeners to fullest rhetorical foreground: while the passive form of the historic present connoted the ‘liberation of the monument from its veil’ as being simultaneous with Mussolini’s speech, the peremptory colon before the emphatic ‘the Duce speaks’ unequivocally encoded the reader’s reception of the scene. The readers of the Secolo XIX were invited to assume the same position as the four absorbed listeners, their backs to the monument, their eyes and ears toward Mussolini. Confirming the conclusions that emerged from the typographical

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analysis, this close reading of the front pages of the Secolo XIX and Il Popolo di Roma indicates conclusively that the fascist press responded to Mussolini’s ‘invitation’ by recoding the ‘scene of enàrgeia’ staged in this final act of the Garibaldian celebrations. In so doing, these imagetexts also revealed that a core rhetorical strategy connected Mussolini’s staging of this final act to his aesthetic policing of both monument and parades analysed in the previous chapter. Evolving from the suppression of modernist aesthetics in Anita Garibaldi’s monument, to the repression of Garibaldianism in the Genoese parade, to the rhetorical construction of fascist historic agency in the Roman parade, to Mussolini’s self-presentation as historic signifier in the inauguration ceremony, the cinquantenario garibaldino put onto the stage of fascist ritual politics a dramatic representation of the fateful surrender of ‘history belonging to the past’ to ‘history belonging to the present,’ and of historical consciousness to the fascist historic imaginary. Said in another way, in the Garibaldian celebrations Mussolini himself translated into ritual form the Gentilian catastrophe of the histor(iograph)ical act, and he did so to fix definitively his self-identification with the history-making imaginary he had evoked in his 1929 speech. The ultimate aim of the cinquantenario’s representational strategy, we may conclude, was nothing short of the radical reversal of the traditional conception of historical consciousness. It was not fascism that gained political legitimacy from an affirmation of continuity with the past. It was that past that gained presence and meaning only through the signifying word of the historic signifier – the Duce. This is why Mussolini so carefully repressed the aesthetic and semantic encoding of the signified ‘Garibaldianism’ in all other representational events. Before it could be signified, the rhetorical construction of its sole legitimate signifier had to be accomplished. Only this complex strategy could stabilize the identity between Mussolini and fascism as historic agent, and the disjunction between the fascist historic imaginary and historical semantics. With reference to the Roman parade, Mussolini re-presented the imago of the fascist mass subject. With reference to the curbing of historical continuity in both the monument and the Genoese parade, Mussolini’s speech acquired the enàrgeia needed to subvert the reception of its signifieds as ‘historical.’ Most significantly, it is plausible that the speech did so not only for its actual audience on the day, but also for its virtual mass audience – that is, all the ‘Cotugnos’ who could not attend the event but who could be reached through the broad dissemination and resonance afforded by the press.

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Returning to our point of departure, we may now fully appreciate both the archival and textual evidentia of Cotugno’s letter. The distinction given to this document inscribed in the archival record of the celebrations the very ‘scene of enàrgeia’ elicited by the press recodings of Mussolini’s speech-event. Its isolation signalled the special status of this document as a relic, a historic relic, attesting to the success of Mussolini’s rhetorical strategy: his re-presentation of himself as historic signifier to the average reader of newspapers. Yet seen in the light of the preceding analysis, the text of this relic also sheds new light on my earlier conclusions. In response to the press’s rhetorical recoding of Mussolini’s speech, Cotugno not only affirmed Mussolini’s uniqueness in having codified a new signified, but he did so in explicit reference to the shortcomings of historians. If we turn to Mussolini’s speech we may immediately verify that there was absolutely nothing new, or unique, let alone ingenious, in what he said about Garibaldi. All of the statements made by Mussolini – from the connotation of Garibaldi as ‘[b]urning with a single passion: the independence and unity of the Fatherland’; to the indication of Garibaldi’s disdain for ‘men, sects, parties, ideologies and parliamentary proclamations’; to the assertion of his being a ‘sponsor of the most unlimited dictatorships’ – had all been quite firmly codified in both fascist popular culture and historical discourse. Cotugno’s comments could not have referred to any signified other than the continuity between fascism and Garibaldianism, which had been repressed by Mussolini until the unveiling ceremony and rhetorically highlighted by the press. By the same token, however, no Italian newspaper reader in the year 1932 could have missed the ubiquitous references to the continuity between Garibaldianism and fascism in both fascist historiography and the popular press. Clearly, then, the hyperbole of Cotugno’s eulogy could not have had anything to do with either the novelty of this signified or the author’s ignorance of its widespread currency in fascist discourse. It could only indicate an exact decoding of the ‘scene of enàrgeia’ presented by the press accounts of Mussolini’s speech-event. In Cotugno’s description of Mussolini’s speech as signifying things ‘whose existence not even Risorgimento historians had ever suspected,’ we thus recognize a clue to the existence of a widespread literacy in Latin Catholic rhetorical codes shared by encoders (Mussolini), recoders (newspapers), and decoders (audiences and readers). In the insertion of this document into an archival ‘scene of enàrgeia’ we find further confirmation that this rhetorical literacy extended all the way to the archival record of the celebrations. Buried in the evidentia of this his-

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toric relic, we thus find an imago of the historic imaginary that underwrote Mussolini’s strategy just as much as its mass media recoding and mass reception. In fact, as flimsy as Cotugno’s lonely testimony might appear, its evidentia is corroborated by the most significant body of evidence left to us by the Garibaldian celebrations: the three newsreels and the two documentaries produced by the fascist film agency, L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE). On the Tracks of the Fascist Historic Imaginary Let us begin with some numbers. LUCE produced a total of 900 metres of edited material on the Garibaldian celebrations, which, by all standards, represented the most elaborate production effort made by LUCE to that date. The final product was subdivided and entitled as follows: (a) one silent newsreel segment: The removal of Anita Garibaldi’s body from Genoa; (b) two sound newsreel segments: Anita’s ashes from Genoa to Rome; and The unveiling of the monument to Anita Garibaldi; and (c) two documentaries: The transferral of Anita’s body from Genoa to Rome and The inauguration of Anita’s monument on the Gianicolo.15 Judging from all available data, the ‘excessive’ editing of such a large amount of footage permits two preliminary observations concerning the extraordinary quality of this documentary corpus, and the overproduction effort made by LUCE in connection with the Garibaldian celebrations.16 First, their filming took place at the apex of a first phase of great growth in LUCE’s productive and distributive power.17 Second, it also happened at a crucial turning point in the cultural encoding of realism, that is, during the first six months of the technical conversion of the Italian film industry to sound production and distribution.18 Both of these factors help us situate these precious representational sources in relation to both Mussolini’s agency and the press accounts analysed above. In the first place, the sheer amount of edited material produced by LUCE on the Garibaldian celebrations calls our attention to a significant element of relative autonomy of this medium from Mussolini’s control. In contrast with Mussolini’s discriminating policing of radio and press, the LUCE camera was present at all commemorative events, and, quite plausibly, its editing staff was concerned with making all of them as appealing as possible for their mass audience. The appearance of LUCE operators at every commemorative event thus announced the presence of a powerful rival that no newspaper could ignore, especially because of the novelty of sound film.19 From the opposite direction of

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Mussolini’s aesthetic policing of the events, the potential of the camera to achieve the highest degree of both realist appeal and rhetorical encoding of reality through sound editing must have affected all press accounts and imagetexts of the events. In retrospect, it may have been in response to this double pressure that the press accounts of both the Genoese and the Roman parades spared no narrative device to bring to light the rhetorical encoding of the events. By the same token, the rhetorical framing that most newspapers added to the Stefani texts in the representation of the inauguration ceremony provides a plausible index of a structural pressure on the print press to adopt all means necessary to compete with a far more formidable mode of mass representation. Surely, however, this pressure was not reciprocal. Newsreels and documentaries were certainly affected by external pressures, but these did not come from the press. Their production was subject to direct government control, Mussolini’s weekly supervision, and a growing dissatisfaction of militant intellectuals with the newsreels’ aesthetics and insufficient mass appeal.20 Yet, as James Hay reminds us, unlike newspapers, newsreels and documentaries also contributed and responded to the evolution of new ‘codes of realism’ whose effectiveness depended on a shared literacy between encoders (newsreel producers) and decoders (mass audiences).21 ‘In the context of Italy’s emerging popular film culture,’ Hay writes, ‘one is obliged to consider the realism [of newsreels] amidst a field of competing cultural models,’ and he rightly adds that ‘documentaries and newsreels offered ways of distilling and magnifying events so that audiences could re-read a national landscape that appeared both natural and ideological.’22 ‘Therefore,’ Hay concludes, ‘documentaries and newsreels must be analysed with a high regard for the historicity of the modes of discourse and exposition, for the “codes of realism” that were themselves being re-negotiated, and finally for the textual complexity and density of their messages (which are all too often viewed by social and political scientists as uncomplicated).’23 Following Hay’s admonition, we may appreciate the unique status of the newsreels and documentaries that brought the June 1932 celebrations to the attention of the Italian masses, specifically for their affording us an oblique but reliable mirror of mass reception. Unlike the press, which was caught midfield between Mussolini’s rhetorical encoding of the events and the LUCE camera, the latter possessed a relative autonomy that made it uniquely sensitive, on the one hand, to the shared literacy of rhetorical codes between the supreme encoder of the events (Mussolini) and their intended decoders (the mass audience), and, on the other hand, to the

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specific negotiations between the competing codes of historical realism that characterized this historic spectacle. Far from representing the events or responding to a Mussolinian dictate, the excessive editing of the Garibaldian delebrations captured on camera their ever elusive protagonist: the fascist historic imaginary itself. At a quantitative level of analysis the distribution of sound and silent footage in the newsreels and documentaries produced on the Garibaldian celebrations reveals immediately the relevance of sound versus silent film to the events recorded.24 The selective editing of silent and sound footage codified in reproduction what we might call the relative representational capital attached by Mussolini to each of the three acts of commemoration: from a ‘minimum’ composed of shorter and exclusively silent footage of the Genoese parade, to a ‘medium’ composed of a sound newsreel segment and the inclusion of the Roman entombment ceremony in the silent documentary, to a ‘maximum’ composed of a sound newsreel segment and a sound documentary reproduction of the inauguration ceremony. This distribution of representational capital was also connected to qualitative choices made according to the specific potentials of the medium, that is, aesthetic choices made in connection with the newness appeal of sound film and the familiarity of silent newsreels, and narrative choices based on the possibility of editing footage referring to different events. In view of both of these qualitative factors, we may legitimately focus our attention on comparing the two most complete and elaborate representations of the commemorative events: the silent documentary on the transferral of Anita’s body from Genoa to Rome and the sound documentary on the inauguration ceremony. Unfortunately the silent documentary has been lost, but its sequences may be reconstructed by comparing its description in the LUCE catalogue with the sequences edited into the newsreels.25 It contained the following: (a) all of the sequences of the silent newsreel segment on the Genoese parade and two more sequences entitled ‘The change of the carriages in front of Mazzini’s monument’ and ‘The people’s emotional salute at the Brignole Station’; (b) all of the silent footage of the Roman entombment (which was never edited in complete form in a single newsreel segment) and one more sequence entitled ‘The halt in front of Garibaldi’s monument’; and (c) the silent footage of the unveiling of Rutelli’s Anita. The documentary’s narrative most likely began with the images of the cemetery of Staglieno, proceeded with the formation of the Genoese parade, followed it through its procession to the train station, picked up

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the coffin on its arrival in Rome, showed the Roman parade’s procession toward the Gianicolo, captured the moment of the coffin’s entombment inside the veiled monument, cut to the arrival of the sovereigns and Mussolini at the monument’s location, and closed with the image of the unveiling of the statue. Of all the commemorative events recorded on camera, the silent documentary excluded only Mussolini’s speech. Naturally, there was no need to include the speech in a silent documentary, especially when it already constituted the bulk of a sound newsreel segment and of another sound documentary. Yet, given the customary practice – maintained at least until 1933 – of editing Mussolini’s speeches also in silent form to emphasize his renowned gestures, this exclusion was certainly an editing choice whose significance may be appreciated in reference to the rhetorical encoding of the whole documentary.26 Judging from the surviving description in the LUCE catalogue, the documentary did not just end with an image of the unveiled monument, but with a close-up on the figure of Anita Garibaldi in the monument that provided a framing match to the opening images shot in the Staglieno Cemetery. This framing explicitly recoded the relationship between the monument and the two parades as a historical narrative of remembrance: the story of Anita Garibaldi’s rescuing from the darkness of her oblivion to the light of monumental memory. In the silent documentary, the codification of mourning, wilfully attached by Mussolini to only the Genoese parade, was thus extended to embrace the Roman parade and the monument itself, framing all these events in a narrative code that was not simply silent, but mute. Better than any Mussolinian stage direction or press imagetexts, the documentary’s narrative framing of all commemorative events except Mussolini’s speech highlighted the rhetorical muteness of historical semantics. To represent instead their incommensurability with the historic semantics of Mussolini’s speech was the task taken up by the sound documentary of the inauguration ceremony. This documentary was divided into two sequences of unequal lengths, comprised of a total of thirty-one shots. The sequences were neatly separated by the insertion of two captions: the first nine shots were preceded by the caption ‘His Excellency the Head of the Government Inaugurates the Monument to Anita,’ and the following twenty-two by the caption ‘The Duce Evokes the Glorious Garibaldian Deeds.’ The two events, the monument’s unveiling and Mussolini’s speech, were thus not only narratively separated, but also significantly given meaning by their captions.

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In the first, Mussolini was simply present at the inauguration as ‘His Excellency the head of the government’; in the second, he was the ‘Duce’ who actualized the Garibaldian past.27 This rhetorical separation of the unveiling-event and the speech-event was signified and amplified in the actual editing of the sequential segments.28 In the first sequence all of the shots were taken in medium-field and from an eye-level point of view, except for three sequential shots in which the combination of alternating points of view, sound effects, and out of sequence editing created special effects of signification. In the first of these – shot five in the unveiling sequence – Mussolini makes his first appearance next to the sovereigns, speaking cordially with them. For the first time the viewer is brought into the space of the event by a close-up. Yet the soundtrack switches abruptly from music to the low noise of distant voices, and the camera’s view from above further magnifies the viewer’s distance from the shot’s referent. Although it follows naturally from the ones preceding it, this shot acquires rhetorical value with reference to the next shot, which in fact was a most unusual one for a documentary. Its referent was clearly staged: reversing the point of view of the previous shot, the camera looks upward to a Piedmontese drummer and a Garibaldian veteran seated back to back and thereby dividing the screen into two perfect halves. The former occupies the screen’s left side: his drum rests at his feet, and he stares, in profile, at the left horizon. The latter constitutes the drummer’s symbolic mirror: an Italian flag rests on his shoulder, while he stares, in profile, toward the horizon at right. Finally, the soundtrack purposely announces and underlines the staged nature of the scene: although a drum is visible resting at the feet of the Piedmontese drummer, it is the sound of a drum roll that loudly interrupts the low, distant noise of voices. The structural link between these two sequential shots could not have been more explicit: both their points of view and their soundtracks constitute a reversed image of one another. In this respect these two shots emphasized, as had all the newspapers, the non-narrative relationship between the ‘historic’ and the ‘historical’ value of their common signified: coexistence between monarchy and revolution. At the same time, the two consecutive shots also sought to fix the relative distance of the mass viewer from this signified as no newspaper could have ever done. In fact, when the next shot hits the viewer with the notes of Garibaldi’s anthem and the image of the monument, it is the rhetorical encoding of the whole sequence – rather than Anita – that is unveiled. Announced by the staged drum roll, unrelated to the distant gazes of the Piedmon-

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tese drummer and the Garibaldian veteran, the monument stands in the centre of the screen, as the sign of that incommensurable distance between the fascist mass viewer and the traditional signification of historical value. At this point the second caption announces Mussolini’s speech, and the mass viewer is introduced into an entirely new representational sequence that separates aesthetically the ‘Head of the State’ from the ‘Duce,’ or the signified from the signifier. In our age of electronic reproduction and virtual reality, the editing of the second sequence of the documentary might appear quite primitive. Indeed, it applied only the most elementary rules of filmmaking, which, today, our increased literacy of editing conventions allows us to recognize immediately as a most basic syntax. Yet the appeal of this second sequence rested not only on the rhetorical exploitation of the medium’s means of encoding, but also on that of its mass viewer’s expectations. On the one hand, we have a most unexpected image of Mussolini, which depicts none of his famous gestures: no rolling eyes, no gazing directly into the camera, no contact with the mass viewer. Instead, Mussolini maintains a statuelike position throughout the speech, his eyes in contact with only his written words. On the other hand, we have the editing eye of the camera stressing the rhetorical encoding of this image. In direct contrast to the first sequence’s positioning of the mass viewer in reference to a specific signified – conciliation between revolution and monarchy – this second sequence seems to be utterly unconcerned with the addressee. In fact, by stressing the rhetorical rupture with the preceding sequence, this second one sought to actively forge a natural and total identification of the spectator with the eye of the camera. While the staging of the three shots analysed above highlighted the significance of point of view and differential distance in the first sequence, the alternation of fixed shots to panning shots in the second sequence obliterated the semiotics of point of view in order to create the illusion of a neutral record. First, the sequence highlighted the enàrgeia of Mussolini’s words in a series of six brief shots in which the soundtrack of the speech’s description of the monument was matched by images of the different segments of the monument corresponding precisely to the description. Then, suddenly, the applause underlining Mussolini’s words comes to an abrupt end, and we are presented with the longest shot of the entire sequence: a close-up of Mussolini’s face while reading the famous paragraph of the speech concerning the continuity between blackshirts and redshirts. No other shot is allowed to

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prevent the reception of Mussolini as signifier. The statuelike firmness of his face and voice in the close-up foregrounds for all viewers the historic nature of his speech in contrast to the historical one of its referent (the monument). In the following three shots, the camera is suddenly animated, as if it were an instrument of Mussolini’s words, and goes back to show parts of the monument. Yet unlike the first six shots of the sequence, the words no longer match the images; the images no longer represent the ‘evidentia’ of Mussolini’s words. The panning camera instead replaces the codified identity between itself and the external eye of the mass viewer with a new identification between the mass viewer and the mental eye of the witness of Mussolini’s speech. These shots, therefore, bore the rhetorical weight of a hypericon: they sought to represent the mutual interaction between the historic speech and the collective historic imaginary of its viewers and listeners. In fact, from this point on, the sequence, and the whole documentary with it, would turn to represent metaphorically the dynamics of the fascist historic imaginary itself. Abandoning the frantic movement of the previous shots, the camera abruptly returns to a medium shot, for the first time bringing the monument and Mussolini together in the same shot. After a few seconds, however, it starts slowly panning toward the right and centres for another few seconds on Mussolini, while his audience becomes visible again on the right side of the frame. Finally, with an accelerated movement, the camera continues its pan to the right until the monument is completely out of sight, Mussolini stands on the left side of the screen, and the audience occupies the centre and right side of the screen. Here it rests, fixing the image of the historic signifier and his subjects. The mass viewer is now completely identified with the newly forged historic imaginary of Mussolini’s audience. His/her internal eye is ready to replace theirs and become the subject of the final segment of the documentary. The first shot in this final segment, a long close-up of the statuesque Mussolini speaking, marks the return of the signifier and the speech’s final address to the sovereigns: ‘Your Majesty! Gracious Queen! If the bronze knight who stands nearby, were to come to life and open his eyes, I dare to hope that he would be happy to gaze at this luminous, vast, and peaceful Rome, which he fervently loved and which he identified from his youth with the Italian Nation.’ Yet right at the end of this sentence the documentary inserts another non-narrative shot: a slow, panoramic pan from left to right of the rooftops of Rome on a sunny day. While continuous with the sign of reception rhetorically encoded

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throughout the second sequence, in this shot the camera movement no longer refers to the internal eye of Mussolini’s audience but directly to that of the mass viewer. Rhetorically, the shot presented a veritable imago of the fascist historic imaginary. At the same time, by implying that Garibaldi too sees through this eye – for Mussolini’s word/image referred explicitly to Garibaldi – the shot also pointed toward the visual rhetorics of presence that sustain the formation of their historic imaginary. Thus encoded, this shot sent to the mass viewer a subliminal message that was at the centre of the whole historic spectacle: without the enargèia of the signifier, the past remains an imago without identity, a monument without aura. Quite literally, in fact, the aura was provided by the documentary’s last shot: a glowing silhouette of Garibaldi’s monument against the Roman sunset.29 It was Garibaldi’s presence realized through the thaumaturgic touch of Mussolini’s words. The mass reproduction of the Garibaldian celebrations in film demonstrates conclusively that the rhetorical homology between the mass media reproduction of Mussolini’s ‘historic speech’ and the ‘scene of enàrgeia’ in which the speech was staged cannot be attributed to Mussolini’s agency alone. More plausibly, underwriting the organization, performance, and reception of both ritual events and their reproduction by the mass media was an already formed historic imaginary shared by their principal encoder (Mussolini) just as much as by their recoders (journalists and LUCE editors) and decoders (crowds and mass media audience). The evidence analysed in this chapter thus confirms that the evolution of the myth-cult of Mussolini-Duce was inextricably intertwined with the formation and institutionalization of a collective historic imaginary in 1920s Italy. More precisely, it shows that the Garibaldian celebrations stood at the historical intersection between the largely spontaneous construction of the ‘atemporal’ image of Mussolini in the 1920s and the image politics that accompanied the subordination of the cult of fascism to the popular cult of the Duce in the 1930s.30 In fact, we may confidently conclude that the primary ideological goal of the cinquantenario was the transfiguration – reminiscent of another protagonist in this story – of a historic imaginary, still oscillating between Risorgimental advent and Great War resurrection, into a properly fascist historic imaginary. Yet I must also add in closing that, contrary to Mr Cotugno’s eulogy, the realization of this goal did not at all exclude ‘historians,’ nor was it demanded solely from the rhetorical savvy of the thaumaturgic Duce.

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As rich as the contest between historical and historic semantics was in the cinquantenario, this contest was not resolved either by Mussolini’s historic-ly coded speech-event or by its mass media reproduction. The same contest, in fact, was played out on a larger scale between the Garibaldian cinquantenario and the fascist decennale. In fact, seen as a single historic spectacle, the cinquantenario-decennale commemorative complex provided a representational bridge for the translation of the ‘historic’ Duce into the ‘epoch-making’ imaginary that pervaded fascist culture in the 1930s. At the same time, the completion of this bridge was not entrusted to fascist ritual politics alone. The study of this composite historic spectacle returns us to the contribution that fascist intellectuals and artists made to the translation of the historic image of Mussolini into a cipher of fascist historicness. The contest between historical and historic semantics was transferred on the terrain of image politics in the Mostra garibaldina and the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, the two historic(al) exhibitions that crowned respectively the cinquantenario and the decennale. As the remaining chapters demonstrate, the institutionalization of fascist historic culture was as dependent on the historic imaginary that underwrote its ritual codification in the Garibaldian celebrations as on the concurrent alliance between avant-garde aesthetics and historic semantics in the evolution of fascist exhibition art.

Chapter Five

THE CONTEST OF THE EXHIBITIONS

However pervasive and overpowering, Mussolini’s control over the Garibaldian celebrations was not absolute. Ezio Garibaldi was left to his own devices in organizing a Mostra garibaldina (MG) (Garibaldian Exhibition) to be set up in the Roman Palazzo delle esposizioni (Palace of Exhibitions) between 1 May and 12 June 1932. Although included in the official program of the cinquantenario, this exhibition was a properly autonomous event that offered Ezio the sole opportunity to create a historical representation of Garibaldianism entirely to his liking. However, entrusted to the curatorial expertise of Antonio Monti, the MG came to provide a representational bridge between the cinquantenario garibaldino and the decennale fascista, as well as to occupy a climactic place in the development of fascist historic culture. In fact, what separated this event from the rest of the Garibaldian celebrations was not so much Ezio’s control over the initiative but the relationship between the Mostra garibaldina and the historical exhibitions that immediately preceded and followed it: the Mostra di Roma nell’ottocento (MRO) (Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome) and the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (MRF) (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution).1 These two exhibitions bracketed the Mostra garibaldina and shaped its role as the central segment of a three-act representation of Italian history from the early nineteenth century through the heroic Risorgimento, and all the way to the Great War and the fascist rise to power. Their sequence offered an ideal representational field for their organizers and a large number of artists and intellectuals to translate into imagepolitics the attending struggle between historical and historic modes of representation.

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The Historical Ottocento on Display In 1930 the Institute of Roman Studies (ISR) organized a successful exhibition on Rome in the seventeenth century that had helped establish Carlo Galassi Paluzzi, founder and director of the Institute since 1922, as a leading figure in the field of historical exhibitions.2 However, in early 1931, when Galassi Paluzzi announced his project to install an ‘Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome,’ he received nothing but warnings ‘and a good number of sinister and catastrophic prophecies for [him], the Exhibition and the Institute.’3 What motivated the timid scepticism of friends and collaborators and the covert or open opposition of foes was the period chosen by Galassi Paluzzi for the new exhibition: the discredited nineteenth century. As Galassi Paluzzi himself admitted a few years later, ‘at the time, the nineteenth century – in part deservedly – had the most inimical press; and to fail to declare one’s disgust for that century resulted in accusations of lack of revolutionary zeal, and charges of nothing less than antifascist sympathies.’4 Galassi Paluzzi’s words illustrate the extraordinary diffusion of a generic and collective sentiment against nineteenth-century culture that pervaded the fascist public sphere. Even for a prestigious representative of historical culture like the president of the ISR – addressing the members of the most prestigious Italian institution of nineteenth-century historical studies – it was quite normal to admit that the ottocento partly deserved collective blame.5 Nonetheless, Galassi Paluzzi rejected the ‘intolerable anti-historicism’ with which the castigation of a part had been transformed into the ‘condemnation of a whole century.’6 For him, those responsible for this cultural disaster were the young Italian artists who belonged to established or emerging avant-garde movements such as Futurismo, Razionalismo, Stracittà, and Novecento. These ‘modernists’ (Galassi Paluzzi’s word) had taken advantage of fascism’s political defeat of ‘nineteenth-century’ liberalism and democracy in order to advance their wholesale rejection of ottocento aesthetics and culture, and thus legitimize their bid for cultural dominance within the regime. From its inception the MRO was thus intentionally organized to rescue nineteenth-century aesthetics from bad modernist press, but, for Galassi Paluzzi, this goal had to be achieved by reconciling ‘the most scrupulous exactitude of memory and documentation with the demands of the present historical moment in which religious and political authority live under a regime of concordant conciliation.’7 In other words, the

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exhibition also aimed at amending in kind the symbolic injuries suffered by the Vatican following Mussolini’s decision to build a monument to Anita Garibaldi and consecrate it during the Garibaldian celebrations. For its organizers, therefore, the highest stakes of the MRO lay in its ability to translate the Concordat into a guiding revisionist principle for closing a still open debate over the relationship between historical scholarship and ‘faith’ (both Catholic and fascist).8 No wonder then that the Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome would come to constitute the quintessential antithesis to both Mussolini’s identification of fascism with ‘making history’ and the historic mode of representation it sustained. The MRO was set up in the Roman Palazzo dei musei and opened to the public from 7 January to 24 April 1932. The first two rooms contained a collection of maps, drawings, and watercolours of nineteenthcentury Rome. A chronological section of fourteen rooms followed, representing Rome from the beginning to the end of the century. Then came a series of ten rooms, each displaying works by non-Italian artists who either lived in or portrayed Rome in their paintings and drawings. According to the catalogue, these twenty-six rooms constituted the proper historical section of the exhibition and were separated from the topical one that followed. This was composed of sixteen rooms dedicated to high culture (architecture, fine arts, theatre, and music in Rome), everyday life (fashion, popular spectacles, carnivals, festivals), social progress (i.e., public services and transportation), and papal court life. However, completing and unifying the two sections were seven rooms containing what the catalogue called ricostruzioni storiche (historical reconstructions), four of which were inserted in the historical section and the other three in the topical section of the exhibition. At first sight, the appearance of these reconstructions in a historical exhibition such as the MRO signalled a puzzling lack of concern for ‘authenticity’ very similar to the lack that Stephen Bann has found in the earliest forms of history museums – such as the ‘century rooms’ arranged by Alexander Lenoir in early nineteenth-century Paris.9 Yet the organic relationship between these reconstructions and the historical items exhibited in the MRO counterbalanced this deficit of authenticity. To begin with, the four reconstructions inserted in the exhibition’s historical section iconized the romantic suggestion of lived history already codified in the representational items exhibited. The first two consisted of a full-scale display of two original rooms from the demolished Palazzo Torlonia, whose early nineteenth-century pave-

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ments, door frames, and furnishings had been preserved. Their synecdochic status was thus signalled by their ability, ‘at one and the same time,’ as Bann says, ‘to retain their individual authenticity, and to participate in an overall, recreative vision of the past.’10 Yet the revived historical user, the princely Torlonia family, was not only named but also fully represented in the exhibition. The Torlonia descendants were among the major private exhibitors, and, more to the point, their nineteenthcentury ancestors and their palace were referred to throughout the entire historical section.11 Like the documents within each historical room, these two reconstructions referred directly to the organic narrative of the representational items and, in so doing, did not disrupt at all the historical encoding of this first section; rather, they reinforced it by reducing the gap between present exhibitor and exhibited past. Compared to the Torlonia rooms, the remaining five reconstructions were far more puzzling. The catalogue refers to them as scenoplastici, that is, waxwork scenes. The first one, appearing in room ten, contained a reconstruction of the studio of the popular nineteenth-century painter Bartolomeo Pinelli. In the left corner there stood a life-size waxwork of the painter’s figure. He was seated in front of a false window in the act of completing one of the several drawings that crowded the walls of the room. In room twelve, visitors found an entire Roman tavern reconstructed. In it were four life-size wax statues of drinkers seated on rustic benches around a rustic table. The remaining objects and room furnishings, including its walls, were treated so as to cast a hint of historicity on the scene as a whole. In the back of the tavern a small window allowed the visitor’s eye to linger over a panoramic painting of early nineteenth-century Rome, seen from the Aventine hill. At the touch of an electrical switch, a play of light could transform it from a daylight scene to a nocturnal scene, and vice versa. Surely neither of these two waxwork scenes could claim the kind of authenticity the first two reconstructions gained from their being original relics. Yet the blatant lack of authenticity of these two scenoplastici – along with the other three coming later in the exhibition – was counteracted, and consequently neutralized, by their iconic reference to the organic totality of the representational items on display. Pinelli’s wax image and the studio itself were reconstructed out of a self-portrait and a drawing by the same artist, both on display on the walls of the reconstructed studio. The osteria romana (Roman tavern) and two of the other scenoplastici, the salterello (popular street dance) and the giocatori di morra (hands-only game), were again copied from works by Pinelli on display,

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while the scenoplastico of the scrivano pubblico (public letter-writer) was reconstructed out of a watercolour by Jan Kracker exhibited in room eleven. Finally, even the painted panorama in the tavern was copied from an exhibited watercolour of Giacomo Maes.12 Quite clearly, then, the MRO’s scenoplastici were no mere coup de théâtre aimed at attracting the curiosity of visitors, but the hermeneutic key to the entire exhibition. They functioned as self-reflexive hypericons, which thematized the real protagonist of the MRO: historical realism. Through them, the MRO made plain that the marriage between history, realism, and the nineteenth century was no mere organic referent but rather the thematic fulcrum of the exhibition. In both mode and content of representation, the MRO documented the cultural triumph of nineteenth-century historical realism. In this respect, its representational strategy could not have differed more radically from the ‘paranoia of centennial systems’ that marked its early nineteenthcentury forefathers.13 The MRO sought to show that, while figures such as Lenoir were intent on representing past centuries metonymically, the nineteenth century had developed a vast range of realist modes of representing its own historicity, and these were the subject matter of the Roman exhibition: lithographic, photographic, drawn, or painted portraits of famous figures of the period; maps of the city and drawings of city plans, monuments, and picturesque views; and pictorial representations of popular scenes, battle scenes, official ceremonies, encounters between famous figures, and so forth. Yet no specific knowledge of deconstruction theory is needed to realize that the supplementary status of the scenoplastici exceeded the intentions of the exhibition’s organizers and went far beyond the intended celebration of nineteenth-century realism. As David Freedberg has argued, waxworks may be thought of as the quintessential signs of the Latin Catholic ‘striving for resemblance [that] has always marked our attempt to make the absent present and the dead alive.’14 Known since Roman times, waxworks constituted the first representational codification of the Latin imago. They were immediately associated with funeral rites, and continued to be so for centuries. During the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic Church had also started using them for a more complex representational practice: the reconstruction of sacred scenes from the life of Christ. This theatrical development led to the establishment, especially in northern Italy, of Monti Sacri (Sacred Mountains) which, as Freedburg explains, presented largescale waxworks aimed at facilitating the unmediated ‘fusion between

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image and prototype’ in the response of the viewer.15 In these early scenoplastici Freedburg locates not only one of the most powerful tools used by the Catholic Church in its implementation of the CounterReformation’s motto invisibilia per visibilia, but also the ultimate sign of that deep-seated drive toward ever more perfect forms of verisimilitude that marks the ontology of the Western imaginary. As he concludes, the nineteenth-century waxworks of Madame Tussaud made modern man confront his ‘fear and attraction for the lifelike’ in a way that not even photography could ever completely match.16 Naturally, appearing in the midst of a historical exhibition in the early 1930s, the MRO’s scenoplastici could not count on the same response that the enàrgeia of the Monti Sacri had elicited for centuries from their devoted pilgrims. In fact, the scenoplastici did not produce any effect of presence because they vividly thematized what Gentile called ‘history belonging to the past.’ They all referred, simultaneously, to what was no longer there (a demolished palace, forever extinguished popular traditions) but was already represented in the exhibition’s visual narrative. In so doing, they affirmed the right of narrative realism to maintain its monopolistic hold on the signification of the historical, both in and of the present and in and of the past. With the scenoplastici the Roman exhibition iconized the natural and organic fit between aesthetic realism and history. Because of them, the exhibition lost some of its revisionist bite, but it also put forward an explicit cultural challenge to all forms of historic representation. Nineteenth-century realism, it polemically asserted, was the sole legitimate code of historical representation. In fact, the novelty of the MRO’s hyper-historical mode of representation in general, and of the scenoplastici in particular, did not escape the eyes of the opponents it targeted (if only by implication). The modernist critic Costantino Sciorsci, of the flagship fascist journal Ordine fascista, took up the representational gauntlet thrown down by the exhibition’s modes of display.17 Sciorsci’s review focused on the relationship between historical representation per se and the exhibition’s audience. In so doing, this reviewer captured the centrality and rhetorical significance of the scenoplastici in a description worth quoting at length: The public proceeds and lingers with equal indifference and admiration before a scenoplastico of Trasteverine folklore, or before another yet immobile but scenoplastica procession ... and, close by, with the same admiration and the same indifference one pauses to observe a human-size Garibaldian soldier and a Swiss guard ... and one cannot help but smile at the way in

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which these two stuffed mannequins still fiercely look at each other ... In such an exhibition one cannot think of the life of a whole century without seeing it as immobile, mummified like those academic and neoclassic portraits of Podesti and his disciples, or those groups of papier mâché hicks, crackers, soldiers, servants and scrivani, which, in the exhibition, populate a square of nineteenth-century Rome, itself of papier mâché, that nonetheless remains silent and cold like a tomb.18

Focusing on the scenoplastici, Sciorsci described the MRO as an imaginary scene of the death of enàrgeia: a funeral procession that embraced both viewers and historical representation. The immobility of the scenoplastici matches that of the lingering public. The farcical contrast between the fierce glance and the stuffed nature of the two mannequins enhances the mixture of admiration and indifference in the parading viewers. Finally, the repressed signified, death, surfaces at the end of the description to encompass the whole representational field. A sepulchral silence springs forth from the originals (Podesti’s neoclassic portraits) as well as from the simulacra that derive from them (the wax mannequins of the scenoplastici; the ‘icy lunar light, and the gray atmosphere’ of the painted panorama), but it also extends to the relics that ‘in the midst of all this stench of things passed away, lose their lively interest and their peculiar evocative powers.’ Finally, concluded Sciorsci, death is enthroned in the reconstruction of the ‘alcova Torlonia’ where ‘the bed under the alcove resembles a catafalque, and its Impero-style columns, enormous mortuary candles.’19 Centring his review on the waxwork scenes, Sciorsci correctly identified their hyper-realist assertion of mimesis as the only legitimate code of historical representation. Yet, in placing his description of the scenoplastici within a discourse on the viewer’s reception, Sciorsci purposely reversed the signs of their legitimacy and effectiveness. Rather than receiving historical legitimization from their reference to the signification of lived history embodied by the original representational items exhibited, the scenoplastici transferred their own deathlike stillness to their viewers, thereby depriving even the most authentic documentary items of their specific evocative powers. For Sciorsci, then, the Roman exhibition had put on display not just a dead century but its own viewers as well. Though the length and detail of Sciorsci’s review were unique, his critique may have been underwritten and endorsed by the whole fascist modernist front, for whom the MRO would have plainly demonstrated

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the aesthetic bankruptcy of historical representation per se. In fact, one of the most authoritative supporters of the modernist movement in architecture (razionalismo), and of all artistic avanguardie in general, Pietro Maria Bardi, openly praised and echoed Sciorsci’s argument.20 Reviewing the exhibition for the Milanese daily L’Ambrosiano, Bardi dramatized the antagonistic relationship between a modernist conception of history and the ‘ottocentista nostalgic incontinence’ displayed by both organizers and admirers of the Roman exhibition. In conclusion, he triumphantly affirmed that the only purpose the MRO had served was that ‘in both form and content it [had] offered a most satisfying measure, and indication of our progress.’21 It might not be too farfetched to suggest that the progress Bardi referred to here was the formation of a fascist historic imaginary and the development of a historic mode of representation pursued by curators such as Monti. Yet Bardi’s self-assurance was not supported by the numbers, nor did it capture the more subtle point made by Sciorsci. Far from being shunned by critics and the public, the MRO was very popular by all standards and most historians’ reviews remarked favourably on the display in general and the scenoplastici in particular.22 As Sciorsci had correctly highlighted, these historical reconstructions had not only successfully naturalized the organic fit between historical-mindedness and nineteenth-century modes of realist representation, but they had also exemplified how (deathly, in his opinion) these modes were still very active and effective. In other words, the very rhetorical flair exhibited by Sciorsci in the critique of the MRO’s scenoplastici was an implicit acknowledgment of the challenge they posed to any modernist conception of historical representation. If the historic imaginary advocated by Bardi was to overcome nineteenth-century historical-mindedness it needed to be visualized in a fully modernist exhibition form. Such, then, was the task awaiting the organizers of the two exhibitions that were to crown the celebrations of the Garibaldian cinquantenario and the fascist decennale : the Mostra garibaldina and the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Both exhibitions represented a unique public opportunity for avant-garde artists, modernists intellectuals, and historians to deal with the counter-modernist challenge raised by the MRO’s display and reception. In fact, in addition to being chronologically successive, the MG and the MRF were spatially connected, being set up in the same prestigious locales of the Roman Palazzo delle esposizioni. This contiguity defined their representational contest as the final round in the confrontation between the ‘historical’ and the ‘historic’.

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Thus, despite Mussolini’s absence from the organizational scene, the celebratory-ritual contest between historical and historic semantics was transferred with these two exhibitions onto the stage of fascist imagepolitics. Not unsurprisingly, historian and museum director Antonio Monti assumed a central role in making this subtle confrontation palpable. Garibaldianism contra Ottocento Unquestionably, the MG constituted for Monti the coronation of all his museotechnical efforts (analysed in Chapter 3). Here Monti could finally introduce to his peers and to the wider public all of his innovations.23 However, the originality of this exhibition was found much more in its curatorial principles than in its museotechnical innovations. As the map of the exhibition shows (Figure 10), the MG’s itinerary was divided into four discrete sections with distinct epistemological identities: (a) Garibaldi’s life and the Garibaldian tradition (rooms 1–6, and 18–24); (b) the transformation of the Garibaldian uniform over time (central gallery); (c) Garibaldi’s manuscripts (rooms 9–12); and (d) popular representations of Garibaldi (rooms 13–17). While the first section constituted the properly historical-narrative part of the exhibition, the other three segments were neither narrative nor merely topical. They were units organized around a specific type of evidence: uniforms, manuscripts, and visual images. Yet in the exhibition guide and catalogue, Monti enigmatically referred to the internal structure of the exhibition as being organized according to a ‘poliaesthetic criterium.’24 What could this awkward neologism refer to – considering that it could not have been more inappropriate for the very uniform late-nineteenth-century style that characterized the historical paintings and the sculptural representations of Garibaldi disseminated in the first section of the exhibition? Set up in twelve non-consecutive rooms and three corridors, the first part of the Garibaldian Exhibition covered the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi, his military feats, and his descendants’ perpetuation of the Garibaldian tradition. Although presented by Monti as the exhibition’s chronological section, its aesthetic itinerary was far from lacking in originality.25 As demonstrated by the photographs of rooms one, twenty, and twenty-four (Figures 11, 12, and 13), all rooms in the narrative-historical section shared a number of characteristics. Each of them featured a centrepiece, sometimes flanked by comfortable armchairs. All

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Figure 10. Floor map of the Garibaldian Exhibition (1932).

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Figure 11. Room 1 in the Garibaldian Exhibition (1932).

documents and small relics were grouped and exhibited together in display cases placed either in the centre or along the walls of each room. All representational items (paintings, drawings, photographs) were framed, hung at eye level from wires attached to the ceiling, and displayed at regular intervals along the walls of each room. Finally, larger relics, sculptures, and uniforms were exhibited on isolated pedestals or in corner display cases.26 Attending to these common features, we notice that all documents and relics, whether in display cases or ad hoc glass cases, were presented as proper footnotes to the visual narrative of Garibaldi’s life, which the visitor could follow across the walls of each room. There, positioned in strict chronological order, and alternating between Garibaldi’s portraits and photographs and depictions of historical scenes or events in the hero’s personal life, the representational items exhibited foregrounded the narrative scope of nineteenth-century historical representation. In addition, Monti exhibited roughly similar ratios of the two types of items in each of the rooms into which he had divided Garibaldi’s life. He also

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Figure 12. Room 20 in the Garibaldian Exhibition (1932).

placed all these items at a regular distance from one another, observing a clear principle of overall symmetry and spatial equilibrium. The aesthetic quality of this arrangement reinforced that of the artistic items exhibited, creating a visual narrative effect that clearly reached its climax in room twenty, where spatial symmetry, chronological documentation, and balanced visualization were brought to a point of almost maniacal perfection (Figure 12). As had been the case with the MRO, the first section of the MG effectively exemplified the relationship between aesthetic realism and historical representation. Yet it did so in direct opposition to the MRO’s attempt to reaffirm such a relationship as inherent in the nature of historical representation per se. In the MG Monti refused to naturalize narrative realism through contemporary scenoplastici or historical reconstructions. Undisturbed by the deathlike spell of contemporary simulacra, the visitor to the Mostra garibaldina was thus thrust into a space of contemplative regularity, where he or she could linger over the discrete beauty of each historical page exhibited and check the footnotes at leisure. In this way the MG’s narrative-historical section refused to exalt

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Figure 13. Room 24 in the Garibaldian Exhibition (1932).

the organic link between historical representation and mimesis and emphasized, instead, its aesthetic dimension: the presentation of the life and feats of Giuseppe Garibaldi historicized the relationship between historical narrative and the nineteenth-century aesthetic of the beautiful.27 In addition, the visual book of Garibaldi’s life and times extended all the way to include his descendants and the Garibaldian tradition. And in this crucial respect, the historical section of the MG was much closer to Rutelli’s Anita than the MRO’s scenoplastici. The extension of the narrative to include Garibaldi’s descendants did not lead to an exaltation, or narrative climax, as might have been expected. On the contrary, a comparison between the catalogue’s record and the available photograph of room twenty-four suggests that Monti did not seek to put Garibaldianism in evidentia or to disrupt the aesthetic code of the narrative section (Figure 13). In Monti’s narrative hands, Garibaldianism seemed to acquire the same surplus of historical value bestowed by Mussolini on Rutelli’s Anita, as well as its rhetorical fragility. Yet the analogy between Mussolini’s and Monti’s rhetorical strategies ended here. In fact, the aesthetic uniformity of the historical rooms did

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not dominate the whole exhibition. On the contrary, what followed suggested that Monti purposely arranged this entire section to undermine rather than exalt the association of Garibaldianism with the narrative aesthetics of historical realism. In the last three sections Garibaldianism was instead to be made properly present in all of its historic forms: as immanence (gallery of uniforms), as presence (Garibaldi’s manuscripts), and as mass appeal (the popular images). Exiting room twenty-four, the visitor found him or herself back at the starting point of the exhibition’s itinerary, this time facing a straight pathway toward the remaining three sections. What followed was a gallery of uniforms that the exhibition’s guide barely mentioned, but that Monti described in detail in an article published in the Corriere della sera a few days after the opening of the exhibition. According to Monti, the gallery exhibited only ‘original’ uniforms that had belonged to three generations of Garibaldian heroes, from those of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Risorgimental companions (Narcisio Bronzetti, Ippolito Nievo, Giuseppe Sirtori, and Luciano Manara) to that of the multi-decorated Cornel Metzenger, who fought in the Garibaldian brigade in the Great War. Among these, Monti singled out the uniform of Giuseppe Sirtori, which, ‘with his red shirt hidden by his black frock coat,’ evoked its allegorical double: the blood-stained black shirt of a fascist squadrista shot and killed near Mentana while marching on Rome in October 1922. ‘A magnificent signification,’ Monti concluded, ‘of the spiritual relationship which links the two marches on Rome, the first called off by Garibaldi at Mentana in 1866, the second finally accomplished by Mussolini in 1922.’28 The unusual rhetorical flair employed by Monti in presenting the gallery of uniforms to his readers signalled that he considered this section to be his curatorial masterpiece.29 In fact, in contrast to the aesthetic of the beautiful encoded in the preceding section, the gallery constituted an emblematic exercise in the aesthetics of the sublime. Taken from the perspective of the visitor entering the gallery, this photograph (Figure 14) shows that the uniforms were mounted on tailoring mannequins of the kind Monti had introduced in the mid-twenties, and they were displayed inside single ad hoc display cases disposed at regular intervals on both sides of the corridor.30 The display cases, in turn, were placed on top of a two-step platform, which elevated them above eye level and compressed them against cantilevered walls on both sides. Clearly, in this section, as opposed to all preceding rooms, Monti finally took advantage of the spatial configuration and adaptability of the Palazzo

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Figure 14. The Gallery of the Uniforms in the Garibaldian Exhibition (1932).

delle esposizioni.31 In so doing, however, he also dramatically modified the relationships among the viewer, the items displayed, and the aesthetic-epistemic code that presided over the arrangement of the first (narrative) section of the exhibition. By shaping the architectural environment so as to maximize the viewer’s apprehension of a series of metonymic items set up at a solemn contemplative distance, Monti dramatically tipped the balance between sensory-visual stimulation and mental-visual projection that characterized the historical beautification of narrative in the first section. In the gallery of uniforms the visitor was both sensory-stimulated and left unencumbered by an already visualized narrative. He or she was thus invited to transform the dialectic between spatial uniformity and the sequence of uniforms into a symbolic conception of historical time itself. For the ever-present face of the hero Garibaldi, dominating and controlling the beautiful tale of a heroic life in the first section, the gallery of uniforms substituted twelve shrines for the absent bodies of those who had fought in his name. To the narrative development of periods and res gestae, it responded with a sequentiality

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that emphasized inherent infinity and uniformity – in a word, immanence. Seemingly reversing Mussolini’s policing of Anita’s monument, Monti’s gallery of uniforms thus successfully encoded the signified that Ezio had attempted to monumentalize with Sciortino’s Anita: the everlasting presence of Garibaldianism. With the gallery of uniforms the historian-curator likely pleased his patron, Ezio, beyond his greatest expectations, but he surely did so also by responding explicitly to the counter-modernist challenge of the MRO. Considering the sharp rhetorical separation wilfully enacted by Monti between the first two sections of the MG in light of the evolution of his image-making activities (examined in Chapter 3), we may immediately capture the novelty of this arrangement as one aimed at both mobilizing and going beyond the traditional aesthetic dichotomy between the beautiful and the sublime.32 The relentless insistence of the exhibition’s chronological section on the visualization of narrative effectively sacrificed the sensory-visual appeal of relics in favour of mental-visual harmony and symmetry. In contrast, the gallery of uniforms inverted this process, hoping to hit the visitor with the wonder inspired by sublime emblems in direct opposition to the preceding beauty of narrative resonance.33 Most plausibly, then, the implicit referent of Monti’s ‘poliaesthetic criterion’ was the ‘sublime dialectic’ between the mental-visual saturation and sensory-visual stimulation obtained by the antithetical arrangement of the first two sections of the MG.34 In fact, with this neologism Monti may have also attempted to conceal the fact that his faithfulness to this dialectic had caused him to break with the professional ethic of historical authenticity whose limits he made very elastic in the 1920s, but beyond which he had never dared to step. Although the gallery was supposed to display only ‘original historical’ items, not all of them were authentic.35 Two uniforms, that of the first Garibaldian volunteers in South America (in the 1830s and 1840s) and that of the Garibaldian defenders of the Roman Republic (in 1847–9), were, in Monti’s own words, ‘representative,’ and had been reconstructed by a local tailor ‘on the basis of contemporaneous documentation.’36 Consequently, their presence in the gallery served exclusively to complete the series and avoid any visible gap in the ‘development of the Garibaldian uniform in time’ – which is how the guidebook unassumingly referred to this section of the exhibition.37 To my knowledge, this small act of historical reconstruction was unprecedented in Monti’s curatorial career, but for that reason it is all the more revealing of the historic encoding of this section.

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Clearly, the replacement of brand new uniforms – modelled after reproductions of the originals – for the missing exemplars did not amount to a falsification or a violation of the traditional foundations of historical epistemology. Yet their insertion was absolutely necessary to highlight the seriality of the display, and thus appeal to the historic imaginary of the visitors. Through means unavailable to any book or document, Monti’s gallery of uniforms sought to disabuse the visitor of the mythical association of Garibaldianism with red shirts and Garibaldi, effectively reversing the terms of the equation. In contrast to the documents and Garibaldian relics inserted in the last two rooms of the historical section, the gallery of uniforms did not look back to Garibaldi’s redshirts but forward to Mussolini’s blackshirts. Garibaldianism – so argued the ensemble of authentic and reconstructed uniforms – had emancipated itself entirely from its historical debt to a specific colour and name. It had become a constitutive trait of the fascist present, one that required re-presentation even when its metonymic part (an original uniform) was not available. On the premise of representation as imago, and in a synecdochic relationship with the original relics, the reconstructed uniforms claimed authenticity from their contribution to the signification of the real presence of Garibaldianism in the fascist historic imaginary rather than from their status of historical reconstructions. The reconstructed uniforms thus constituted an explicit obverse of and implicit response to the MRO’s scenoplastici. Contrary to the scenoplastici’s thematization of verisimilitude as the sole legitimate code for historical representation, they stressed the rhetorical rather than the ontological relationship between mimesis and historical representation. Yet just like the scenoplastici in the MRO, the gallery of uniforms offered a hypericon of the whole exhibition. In fact, the gallery was not only designed to contrast with the historical representation of Garibaldianism in the narrative section of the exhibition, but also to stimulate the visitor’s sensory-visual apparatus of reception and prepare the ground for the perception of ‘presence’ in the manuscript and popular images sections of the exhibition. The separation of words from images in these last two sections capitalized on the sensory-visual stimulation generated by the gallery of uniforms. As several reviewers remarked, Garibaldi’s manuscripts were key in generating the emotional response of the visitors to Garibaldi’s presence. The sensory-visual appeal of Garibaldi’s calligraphy and of the paper he wrote on oriented the viewer’s response toward an unmediated fusion of sign and signified. Similarly, according to the authorita-

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tive art historian Renato Pacini, the last popular images section of the exhibition allowed the visitor ‘to see what Garibaldi and Garibaldianism was in the mind of the common people of that time.’38 These representations were, for Pacini, the products of ‘unconscious actors, absorbed by the examination of this or that historical actor, ready to interpret any move, each according to his own mentality and point of view.’39 In contrast to the historical paintings of the narrative section, these popular-visual representations of Garibaldi renounced historical realism in favour of perspectivism and making the past present. They thus offered the visitor a classic ‘scene of enàrgeia’ in which Garibaldi’s res gestae were made present to the 1932 viewer through the emotional reactions of contemporary witnesses. With its 200,000 visitors, the MG proved to be ‘the most popular exhibition ever organized and hosted in the Palazzo delle Esposizioni’ (to that date) and received almost unanimous acclaim from its reviewers.40 At the same time, reviewers were also remarkably split over what they found praiseworthy in the exhibition. A small group focused exclusively on the narrative section of the exhibition, declaring the success of the MG in providing a ‘total view of an epoch,’ a ‘panoramic look at the history of Italy,’ or ‘a synthesis of the inviolable continuity of the Italian stirpe,’ or, simply, a picture ‘of [Garibaldi’s] wonderful life.’41 The majority, by contrast, drew their readers’ attention to the last three sections of the exhibition (the gallery of uniforms, the manuscript section, and the popular representations) by underscoring their rhetorical contiguity, aesthetic originality, and impact, as well as the MG’s overall success in overcoming its predecessor, the despised MRO.42 Not surprisingly, no reviewer did so more explicitly and enthusiastically than P.M. Bardi. In his review, Bardi focused exclusively on the last three sections of the exhibition, stressing their common success in making it possible for the viewer ‘to touch the history of the Risorgimento in the name of the Italian Revolution which Garibaldi began and which Mussolini continues,’ doing so by ‘pushing aside and rightly confounding a certain exhibition of the Roman ottocento.’43 Clearly, Bardi’s review recognized that the contrast between the two exhibitions was not one of content but one of modes of representation. In fact, Bardi made this contrast graphically explicit in the most emphatic way by referring to the MG throughout the article as the ‘Mostra’ (Exhibition), always in quotation marks and capitalized. Coming from the foremost Italian experts in press design, this typographical emphasis signalled unequivocally the MG’s membership in that new species of modernist exhibitions that Bardi had recently

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called for on the pages of the Ambrosiano.44 According to Bardi ‘the time [had] come to stop hanging pictures with strings stretching for metres and metres from iron bars attached horizontally to the ceiling.’ Above all, he insisted, ‘the manner in which art exhibitions are organized nowadays is mistaken in its guiding principles: it is misguided not to take account of the most fundamental art form, that is, architecture,’ and he concluded that ‘[a]rchitecture, painting, and sculpture must be made to adjust to one another, and we must find new exhibitory “forms” that are “art” in themselves.’45 Clearly then, Bardi’s enthusiasm for Monti’s ‘Mostra’ could not have stemmed from the historical section, in which so many paintings had been hung in the very manner he had criticized just a few months before. His militant commitment to an architectural conceptualization of exhibitions and to the need to develop them into a proper art form suggests that his use of the term ‘Mostra’ referred to Monti’s arrangement of the last three sections. As we have seen, the gallery of uniforms achieved the desired staging of immanent Garibaldianism thanks to a crucial architectural intervention. Similarly, it was the spatial separation of the three classes of items exhibited in these last sections that enhanced their singular potential to convey an effect of presence. Short of providing proof for the mental oscillation of the fascist subject between ‘history belonging to the past’ and ‘history belonging to the present,’ the critical reception of the MG strongly suggests that this exhibition was perceived as staging a contest between ‘historical’ and ‘historic’ modes of representation – with the latter being especially celebrated by modernist critics such as Bardi. No wonder, then, that Bardi himself would be among the first to emphasize the connection between the Garibaldian Exhibition and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution that was to follow it within a few weeks. For Bardi, the main task of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution was to ‘integrate the Garibaldian [Exhibition] so as to clarify the ideal correlation between the two ventures.’46 What Bardi did not anticipate, however, was that the MRF would accomplish this task by emphasizing explicitly the incommensurability between the historic representation of Garibaldianism and the demonstration of the fascist historic imaginary itself. The Fascist Historic Imaginary on Exhibit What opened in Rome is not simply ‘the exhibition’ (la mostra), but something greater; it is ‘the demonstration’ (la dimostrazione) of the Fascist Revo-

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lution. And here I employ the verb ‘to demonstrate’ in its literary and figurative, as well as its mathematical and physical meanings. The show makes the Revolution plain, palpable, and intelligible, while at the same time providing proof, a definitive proof of the experiment’s success, by calculation and figure. It took Fascism to revolutionize Italy in depth, before such an artistically revolutionary – and at the same time so very Italian and Fascist – idea could even be conceived.47

Just like the event to which it referred, this definition of the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (MRF) written by fascism’s foremost art critic, Margherita Sarfatti, has justly commanded the attention of the many scholars who have studied the aesthetic, ritual, and political-religious aspects of this exhibition. Echoing Sarfatti’s emphasis on its artistic value, most scholars have focused their attention on the ‘futurist,’ ‘rationalist,’ or simply ‘modernist’ imprint of the MRF.48 Not enough attention, however, has been paid to the rhetorical and conjunctural context of Sarfatti’s review. In the first place, Sarfatti’s celebrated definition followed an explicit comparison between the MRF and the MG, in which the critic contrasted Monti’s arrangement of ‘miles and miles of documents, aligned one after the other in a colourless series of pigeonholes’ to the ‘work of art’ created by the modernist artist-organizers of the MRF. For Sarfatti, the MRF was thus a ‘demonstration’ in so far as it had achieved a properly modernist form of historical exhibition. Second, Sarfatti’s association of the term ‘demonstration’ with ‘palpability’ and ‘definitive proof’ connected the avant-garde aesthetics of the exhibition to the rhetorical ‘effect of presence’ (enargèia) inscribed in the Latin notion of demostratio (to point at an invisible object).49 In other words, Sarfatti’s review highlighted the way in which the MRF had successfully pushed aside and confounded its immediate predecessor (the MG) by fusing avant-garde aesthetics and Latin Catholic rhetorical codes. In hindsight, Sarfatti’s sarcastic dismissal of the MG could not have been more ungenerous toward Monti’s curatorial masterpiece and in more strident contrast with the praises of her modernist colleague and friend Bardi. Yet the contrast between the two modernist critics is all the more significant because it highlights their common awareness of the ‘contest of exhibitions’ that characterized the year of the cinquantenariodecennale. In fact, Sarfatti’s comparison between the MRF and the MG not only mimicked and reversed Bardi’s comparison between the MG and the MRO, but also highlighted the incommensurability between the MG and the MRF rather than the integration wished for by Bardi. As we shall

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see below, Sarfatti correctly captured the success of the latter in staging a historic representation of the fascist historic imaginary itself. However, what Sarfatti could not know is that this symbolic feat was neither solely nor primarily the accomplishment of the thirty-four artists involved in the installation of the MRF – as she assumed in her review. Since the beginning, the historic encoding of the MRF was designed and pursued primarily by the very historian and curator that Sarfatti had implicitly criticized, Antonio Monti. The idea for an exhibition of fascism was not Mussolini’s nor was it initially connected to the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the March on Rome. Sometime in early 1928, the president of the Milanese Institute of Fascist Culture (IFCM) and future minister of popular culture, Dino Alfieri, invited Monti to join him in planning a Mostra storica del fascismo (MSF) (Historical Exhibition of Fascism), which was supposed to open in Milan on 23 March 1929 in conjunction with the tenth anniversary of the foundation of the Milanese fasci di combattimento (fighting fasces). The MSF, however, was never set up in Milan. In the winter of 1928 – suddenly and unexpectedly – it was hijacked by Mussolini, moved from Milan to Rome, and postponed from 1929 to 1932. The result, of course, was the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista. Yet, as Jeffrey Schnapp has pointed out, the 1928 MSF plan anticipated and prefigured the ‘narrative scheme and certain key design concepts’ of the MRF.50 The plan, in fact, was built around a montage-based approach that was an absolute novelty in Italy, most likely inspired by El Lissitzky’s kinetic pavilion at the 1928 Cologne International Press Exhibition.51 However – judging from some handwritten remarks – the modernist ideology of design displayed by this plan respond not only to the external challenge offered by the Soviet Revolution and constructivism, but also to the evolving institutionalization of a historic mode of represenation pursued by Monti since the mid-twenties. Answering Alfieri’s wish that the exhibition ‘display the immediate evidence of what [the documents] seek to represent,’ Monti insisted on the need for ‘graphics, free-standing pillars, models, and a mise en scène which could attract the spectator’s attention.’ But he also warned that ‘being iconographically [sic] more interesting,’ the part of the exhibition centred on the Great War would have been overpowering and would have ‘damaged the impression’ given by the part that represented the political birth of fascism in 1919.52 Both suggestions made plain that planning this historical exhibition constituted for Monti a crucial moment of aesthetic and ideological clarification. On the one

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hand, Monti’s proposals to Alfieri signalled a definitive abandonment of his long-standing stress on the Great War as historic event and symbolic model for the representation of all national struggles. On the other hand, they pointed toward the fusion of avant-garde aesthetics and the historic representation of fascism. Most plausibly, it was in recognition of his decisive contribution to the 1928 planning of the MSF that Alfieri called on Monti to join him and the ex-futurist journalist Luigi Freddi in the organization of the MRF.53 Like Freddi, Monti joined Alfieri from the beginning and was entrusted with extracting the overall chronology of the exhibition from Il Popolo d’Italia and coordinating the collection of all material to be exhibited.54 From this organizing triumvirate of Alfieri, Freddi, and Monti originated the overall design of the exhibition and the historic criteria that were to guide the thirty-four artists – representative of all Italian avantgarde and traditionalist artistic tendencies55 – and the ten storiografi (historiographers or historical witnesses) invited to create the exhibition.56 Monti’s presence in particular may have been consequential in devising ways to highlight continuities and discontinuities between the MRF and the exhibition of Garibaldianism he had just curated in the same locale. The modernist masque designed by rationalist architects Libera and De Renzi for the Palazzo delle esposizioni made blatantly clear that the first objective of the MRF was to declare explicitly its representational incommensurability with any of the exhibitions that had preceded it, and with the MG in particular (Figure 15). A red cubic structure covered the entire architectural body of the late-nineteenth-century building, fronted by four metallic pilaster-fasces sustaining the gigantic heading of the exhibition (MOSTRA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE FASCISTA). As Jeffrey Schnapp has perceptively noted, this facade aimed to disassociate the fascist revolution (and its demonstration) both from the Garibaldian revolution and the nineteenth-century beaux-arts aesthetics of the Palazzo delle esposizioni, which was ‘redolent of melancholic echoes of past grandeur.’57 The MRF, then, did not intend either to continue – as Bardi had imprudently anticipated – or merely to challenge its immediate predecessor. Rather, it meant to overcome it as history and as representation. The metallic energy of four twentyfour-metre-high, free-standing fasces loudly announced this intention, but it was painstakingly implemented in both the planning and installation of the exhibition. Looking at this floor map of the MRF (Figure 16) we immediately notice that the exhibition was purposely divided in two sections. As

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Figure 15. The facade of the MRF (1932).

Schnapp has already noted, ‘strictly speaking, the full sweep of the Mostra’s historical narrative [was] contained within the [first] fifteen rooms’ (A–Q), while ‘the chronological sequence [was] extended and enhanced by the inclusion of four additional large rooms (T–U) whose contents are “historical” yet whose order is not chronological.’58 The route proposed by the exhibition thus exploited and expanded on Monti’s division of the MG into a perimetric ‘historical’ section and a central ‘historic’ section. In the MG, however, this separation remained implicit and was disclosed only by its reviews. By contrast, in the MRF, this division was explicitly stated in the catalogue, implemented by its organizers with the utmost attention to detail, and rigidly codified in the architectural moulding of the palace interior. Rather than staging a confrontation between historical and historic modes of representation – as had been the case with the MG – the separation of the MRF’s itinerary in two sections was aimed at dramatically enhancing the historic encoding of both. Developing and overcoming Monti’s scheme, the MRF’s itinerary proposed a peripheral tour of fifteen ‘historic narrative’ rooms leading toward four ‘historic imaginary’ halls that occupied the central rooms of

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Figure 16. Ground floor map of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (1932).

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the palace. As we shall see in more detail below, the perimetric rooms were designed to enact a modernist representation of fascist historic agency, and the central four, to give a definitive gestalt to the fascist historic imaginary. This determination was clearly reflected in Alfieri’s decisions concerning the division of labour between historiographers and the artists involved in the enterprise, the historic narrative rooms (A–Q) being assigned to mixed teams composed of one historiographer and one or more artists, the latter four (R–U) employing solely artists under Monti’s supervision.59 However, the translation of the organizers’ goals into specific representational criteria and directions was entrusted to the Traccia storico-politica della mostra del fascismo (Political-Historical Outline for the Exhibition of Fascism) that Freddi wrote in collaboration with Monti.60 This blueprint of the exhibition periodized, selected, and discussed all the events to be represented, but above all it imparted general criteria and aesthetic suggestions to all artists and historiographers before they set to work on their assigned rooms.61 In the first place, the outline called on each team ‘to depersonalize the exhibition so that the events themselves, more than people, may speak, and the personality of the Duce may be made present and emphasized.’62 What this meant in practice was that the exhibition was to be centred around a unique protagonist: not Mussolini in person, nor fascism in general, but Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia – with all the allegorical references its title (‘The People of Italy’) implied. In fact, Il Popolo d’Italia provided the chronicle of events to be represented, as well as the symbolic fulcrum and the representational code around which to unify the aesthetic eclecticism of the exhibition. In Il Popolo d’Italia the MRF’s organizers correctly identified the most appropriate representational means to give symbolic-visual form to the fascist historic imaginary. In fact, the emphasis laid by the outline on the role of Il Popolo d’Italia constituted not only the most original aspect of the new plan but also the most significant departure from, and improvement over, the original 1928 plan. To begin with, the newspaper provided an immediate solution to the concerns expressed by Monti in 1928 about the representational disproportion between the war section and the postwar section in the first plan: Il Popolo d’Italia would be the common denominator. Second, the chronology of events lifted by Monti from its pages and narrativized by Freddi in the outline made questions of interpretation simply redundant. Last, but not least, in Il Popolo d’Italia the artists found the perfect representational means to depersonalize the historic Duce himself and

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transfigure him into the impersonal idea of fascist historic agency. Executing almost to the letter the directions of the outline, the artists avoided as much as possible all figurative representations of Mussolini (of which only two appeared in the first ten rooms), sparing no efforts instead in identifying Mussolini with the typeface of his newspaper. In fact, thanks to Freddi’s provision of an in-house photographic laboratory, all available photographic and montage techniques were utilized to reproduce Mussolini’s editorials so that they could figure prominently in every room.63 Freddi himself was the first one to take advantage of his own provisions by installing a gigantic reproduction of the front page of the first issue of Il Popolo d’Italia in the first room of the exhibition (room A). The catalogue’s entry is worth quoting at length: Suddenly, the gigantic enlargement of the first number of Il Popolo d’Italia looms large upon the entire room. It is the most colossal enlargement ever accomplished. It dominates [the space], a massive form protruding from the wall as if it were the foundation stone for all the events that will follow. It is the solemn and warlike motif that will be developed throughout the Exhibition, in order to demonstrate how a newspaper directed by a Man of genius, of iron will and burning passions, can truly make history.64

The invisible protagonist (Mussolini) announces and forges a new era and a new people from the pages of his allegorical weapon (Il Popolo d’Italia). Next to the front page, above the entrance to the next room, the title-head of the newspaper is repeated a hundred times to cover the entire territory of a stylized Italian peninsula (Figure 17). In the background we can see a wall covered with negative reproductions of many articles announcing the formation of the first revolutionary fasces. The historic essence of Mussolini’s word was thus immediately foregrounded; henceforth its actualitas would be put on display. Beginning with Freddi’s rooms A and B, and all through the peripheral itinerary, phrases, mottoes, and entire passages selected from Mussolini’s editorials in Il Popolo d’Italia were plastered on the walls and ceilings of every room to create a narrative thread unifying the heterogeneous aesthetics of the different rooms and events. At the same time, the original articles were displayed in the window cases next to documents and relics of the events to which they referred so as to underline the documentary character of the narrative. In this way, all distinctions between document and commentary were first eliminated and then

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Figure 17. Room A in the MRF. The gigantic enlargement of the first front page of Il Popolo d’Italia is visible on the right of the bas-relief map of Italy.

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inverted: in the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, the historical document functioned as commentary to Mussolini’s words embodied in Il Popolo d’Italia. This way, Il Popolo d’Italia provided all artists and historiographers not only with a unifying aesthetic code, but also with a unique representational means to express the actualist catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act in avant-garde aesthetic syntax. And, predictably, this operation was nowhere more effective than in the two rooms arranged by Monti himself: rooms C and D on the Italian intervention and victory in the Great War. The arrangement of these two rooms responded to both Monti’s original concern, expressed in 1928, with containing the war’s iconographic aspect, and his firsthand involvement in designing the new exhibition. In fact, Monti revealed the guiding criterion of the MRF in an article published a few weeks before the opening of the exhibition: ‘The comments and the reconstructions of the historical climate around the documents of the war will find a leitmotif, which will link this section to the other ones in the exhibition, in the captions – taken for the most part from Il Popolo d’Italia of the years 1914–1918 – that will animate the wide walls above the space reserved for documents and relics. In fact these sculptural mottoes and phrases constitute the stuff of history.’65 As this photograph (Figure 18) shows, the figurative elements of each room were all architecturally isolated from the window-cased documents and the photomontages placed above them.66 This arrangement was clearly aimed at giving maximum result to the dominant element in both rooms: Mussolinian phrases extracted from Il Popolo d’Italia, which, alternating between small and large capital letters, marked the architectural space of both rooms. In Monti’s hands Mussolini’s words had become Il Popolo d’Italia phrases, hovering above art and history, figurative representation and document, and allegory and reality. Visually reinforced by Achille Funi’s architectonic classicism, their perimetric sweep appeared to infuse order into the seeming chaos of the war effort. The walls and the pilasters accommodated their longitudinal spread, and, while the documents and relics of the years of suffering were contained within their frames, all the figurative elements, such as the futurist ‘war trophy’ visible above the entrance to room D, seemed tuned to the shaping enàrgeia of the Mussolinian sentence. Quite clearly, in these rooms, Monti had finally merged avant-garde aesthetic codes with the historic mode of representation he had been elaborating throughout the 1920s and had first implemented in the MG. At the same time, he had done so in keeping with the second criterion

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Figure 18. Room C in the MRF (1932).

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prescribed by the outline: the visitor was to conceive and perceive the exhibition as ‘a gigantic symphony,’ building a ‘dramatic and spectacular “crescendo” leading to the final apotheosis.’67 From the point of view of fascist discursive rhetoric, the musical metaphor of a symphonic crescendo used by the outline was neither particularly striking nor original. Yet this was also the same metaphor Alfieri used repeatedly in describing the exhibition’s ‘symphonic’ narrative as divided in three tempi (periods or acts).68 The first tempo comprised the period from interventionism to the Italian victory in the Great War (rooms A–D), the second, from the victory to the founding of the fasces (rooms E), and the third, from the foundation of the fasces to the March on Rome (rooms F–Q). In addition, Alfieri repeatedly specified that the first two tempi were supposed to be represented very synthetically, while the third one was to receive ‘as full a treatment as possible.’69 This provision would ensure the crescendo of the symphonic tempi, while their unity would be entrusted to the transfiguration of Il Popolo d’Italia from chronological tool to thematic protagonist of the exhibition. Neither the outline’s nor Alfieri’s musical metaphors, then, were casual or generic allusions to gesamtkunstwerk aesthetic principles. Rather, this type of language referred precisely to the organizers intention to achieve a synaesthetic encoding of the visual narrative – that is, the transformation of visual stimuli into tactile-auditory perception. It was in fact through the synaesthetic encoding of the narrative itinerary (rooms A–Q) that the MRF found the proper means to give sensory-visual form to the notion of fascist historic agency evoked by Mussolini in 1929. Viewed as the exhibition’s first tempo, the war rooms were clearly united by the increasing classicism of the architectonic space and the incremental distinction between the different representational elements. The signified of their aesthetic crescendo was quite clear: the moulding power of Mussolini’s historic word over the world of history. In this respect, the narrative thrust of these four rooms seemed to promise an imminent climax. Instead, entering room E, the visitor was thrust into a brand new representational space, albeit not entirely discontinuous with the preceding one. Room E announced the energetic brevity of the revolution’s second tempo, the brief period/act between the victory in the war and the official birth of fascism on 23 March 1919. This room had been arranged by the journalist Alberto Capodivacca and the novecento painter Arnaldo Carpanetti, and it depicted the conflict between the historic word of Mussolini and the chaotic reality of the immediate postwar period (Figure 19). Figurative

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Figure 19. Room E in the MRF (1932).

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collages and architectural compositions that assaulted the visitor with a host of visual stimuli occupied all four walls. Facing each other were the initial and concluding figurative groups, the ‘great victory’ wall, and a mural representing the ‘founding of the Fasci di Combattimento.’ Between them, one found the confrontation between ‘Bolshevik drunkenness,’ and ‘Mussolini’s exhortations.’ Yet the most striking element of the whole room was the almost continuous line of window cases set right below the figurative groups. Within these framed areas, a restlessness seemed at first to possess the relics and documents of the postwar era, as if they were commenting on the confusing historical scene depicted by the figurazioni veristiche (naturalistic figurations) of Carpanetti. The images thus appeared to be impinging upon the orderly progression of history. To defend history from their assault, and to create the necessary buffer zone to realign its course, stood Mussolini’s statuary phrases, all of them signed MUSSOLINI and all duly quoted from Il Popolo d’Italia. In the end, they won a victory over the chaos of history and its images – as shown by the window case in the picture (Figure 19) where the documents were arranged as if coming out of a printing press. Thus, under the final representation of the birth of fascism the documents’ restlessness was placated, and a new historic depiction closed this second revolutionary act. A second gigantic enlargement of the newspaper’s front page of 24 March 1919, was set next to a mural depicting a dramatic progression of fasces (Figure 20). It is not simply that the five aligned fasces rendered obvious the symbolic hint of an unstoppable fascist march. Carpanetti’s mural was also a direct quotation from an imagetext that the spectator would soon encounter in the central historic section of the exhibition. His painted fasces mimicked and anticipated Sironi’s architectural arrangement of the Gallery of Fasces (compare Figures 20 and 28). In so doing, they inscribed this second tempo of fascism as a new signpost of the fascist historic, one that the spectator was to recall retrospectively while strolling through the historic halls of the central section of the MRF. Before getting there, however, the visitor was still required to go through the full sweep of the third tempo: the proper ‘revolutionary’ act. This final and longest tempo comprised the most diverse and artistically compelling rooms of the MRF perimetric itinerary. The sheer number and variety of artists who worked on rooms F to Q – ranging from the advertising wizard Marcello Nizzoli, to the strapaesano Mino Maccari, to the futurist Enrico Prampolini – forbade any serious attempt to reduce their arrangements to a single aesthetic unit. Yet the sequence of these

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Figure 20. Room E in the MRF (1932).

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rooms did not disrupt the historic subtext firmly encoded in the first five. On the contrary, quite aside from the diverse aesthetic solutions adopted by each team for its room, they all conformed to the organizer’s rhetorical strategy in two fundamental ways. First, by continuing the plastering of walls with Mussolinian phrases and mottoes, the MRF’s third tempo continued to elide the distinction between document and commentary, and to depersonalize the exhibition. Second, by intensifying the unity of figurative, verbal, and architectural languages, these ten rooms sought to make history literally present to the viewer through the synaesthetic thrust of historic picturing. To both of these ends, the architect-painters continued to modulate the relationship between Mussolinian phrases, figurative elements, and documents in order to transform words and images into a synaesthetic crescendo that finally climaxed in rooms O, P, and Q, dedicated to the preparation and performance of the historic event itself, the March on Rome of 27 October 1922. The young rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni arranged Room O to represent the fascist gatherings preceding the march in late October 1922. According to the catalogue, Terragni’s futuro-rationalist room was designed to be in contrast to the ‘tragic’ rooms that preceded it, by communicating ‘an immediately different, synthetic, and dynamic sensation.’70 From the visual suppression of all normal reference points to the widespread use of reflecting metals such as copper, and from the rich lighting effects to the mirror images created by the shiny black linoleum floor, this room approximated an allegorical teatro di masse (Figure 21).71 As Libero Andreotti has rightly suggested, Terragni achieved this theatrical operation by means of ‘a spatial structure consistent with the historical narrative’ and the explicit ‘intention to undermine the distinction between real, apparent, and reflected image.’72 In fact, in this room, Terragni brought synaesthetic crescendo and historic semiotics to a joint climax. Rather than distancing the spectator, the hypervisualization proposed by Terragni sought to confound the viewer’s sense of self-identity before he or she confronted the final constitution of the ‘Fascist Mass.’ This huge allegorical photomontage of the gatherings that preceded the March on Rome resolved the historic narrative while abolishing all reflective distance between the spectator and the representation (Figure 22). A Piedmontese drummer allegorically underlined the historic meaning of Mussolini’s handwritten words (to the mother of a fascist martyr), while three wheels or turbines that transformed the amorphous crowd into the compact fascist mass of the last revolutionary act

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Figure 21. Terragni’s Room O in the MRF (1932).

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Figure 22. Terragni’s Room O. Photomontage of the ‘Adunate.’

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gave visualization to this historic meaning.73 The stylized hands flying toward the gigantic X on the ceiling pointed the spectator’s attention toward the present (understood as the Roman numeral ten, the ‘X’ also referred to the decennale), thereby prefiguring the historic transformation of Terragni’s ‘transparency and dispersion into Sironi’s unity and concentration’ in the rooms dedicated to the historic event itself, the March on Rome (P and Q).74 Mario Sironi was indisputably the most important artist and exhibition designer involved in the MRF.75 It is not surprising that he alone received the commission for four rooms, but it is indicative of his status that these were the last two rooms of the historic agency section (P and Q) and the first two of the historic imaginary section (R and S). As several scholars have emphasized, the organizers’ choice to entrust Sironi with these four rooms reflected their utmost concern with ensuring aesthetic continuity between the two sections of the exhibition.76 However, the four rooms Sironi designed for the MRF also present crucial differences and discontinuities both among themselves and compared to what preceded and followed each pair. These differences reveal a specific concern with the rhetorical encoding of each section, in addition to their aesthetic unity. While the chromatism of Sironi’s first two rooms maintained a crucial aesthetic continuity with the crescendo of the preceding thirteen, the sheer materiality of their volumes and surfaces revealed their simultaneous historic encoding. The passage from Terragni’s to Sironi’s aesthetics was a sharp and unequivocal passage from optical to tactile appropriation.77 In other words, the doorway between rooms O and P was the gate of ultimate synaesthesia, albeit an overcoded one. Rooms P and Q returned the spectator to the modern (novecentista) space and the separation among iconography, documentary display cases, photomontages, and Mussolinian phrases that he or she had witnessed in the first four rooms of the exhibition (compare Figures 23 and 18). All of these elements, however, were magnified in scale and clarified in their relations. In this way, Sironi achieved the most important rhetorical task assigned to him. The beginning of the narrative (the war) was retroactively recoded as simultaneous with its ending. While the March on Rome was represented as immanent in the historical facts that preceded it, the meaning of these facts was at last made present to the spectator in reference to the historic event to which they led. We may therefore agree with Jeffrey Schnapp that, in the MRF, ‘the move from periphery to center [was] accompanied by the aesthetic

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Figure 23. Sironi’s Room P in the MRF (1932).

shift, prepared [by Sironi] in rooms P and Q,’ from ‘hot Modernist chaos’ to a ‘cool and orderly streamlined Moderne.’78 Surely Sironi’s rooms R and S carried through and developed the monumental language of forms anticipated in rooms P and Q. And while Longanesi’s room T temporarily reduced this scale, it also continued Sironi’s ‘streamlining’ of forms, thereby offering ‘a kind of antichamber to room U, the exhibition’s climax and sancta sanctorum.’79 Focusing on the aesthetic continuity among these four rooms, most recent commentators have thus emphasized the ‘ritual order’ separating the central section of the MRF from the diachronic sequence of rooms A through Q and have highlighted the primary role that Mario Sironi played in accomplishing this ‘epic demonstration’ of fascism. Yet in looking a bit more closely at the aesthetic-ritual texture of the MRF’s central section, we find something more than a ‘Sironian exhibition.’80 Into the fabric of these four rooms (R to U) was woven a rhetorical thread that – to a greater extent than, and in spite of, the undeniable aes-

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thetic continuity characterizing Sironi’s four rooms (P to S) – unified the central rooms and separated them from the perimetric ones that preceded them. This thread consisted of the realization of one specific provision called for by the outline: the reconstruction of Mussolini’s first and last offices at Il Popolo d’Italia.81 The peremptory nature of this disposition – compared to the suggestive tone of all other aesthetic recommendations – confirms that the MRF’s organizers took their historic task seriously and quite literally from the beginning. The two reconstructed offices were designed to function as proper historic sites of the Revolution. Figuratively, they were meant to render palpable the allegorical level of the historic narrative by monumentalizing the connection between the historic protagonist and the historic people-in-the-making: Mussolini was, quite literally, the ‘Popolo d’Italia’ (Italian people) in their march toward the fascist state. Thus, just like the MRO’s scenoplastici and the MG’s gallery of uniforms, these two reconstructions functioned as hypericons of the exhibition’s encoding. Unlike either, however, their final placement rendered palpable the self-referential movement of the whole exhibition. Initially, Freddi’s outline had called for the two offices to be positioned in rooms F and Q, that is, in the historic narrative section, at the beginning and end of the Revolution’s third tempo. Yet sometime during the installation phase, Alfieri reassigned the first office reconstruction to Sironi’s room R (‘Hall of Honour’) and the last office reconstruction to Longanesi’s room T (the ‘Hall of Mussolini’). The significance of this change can never be overstressed, not only because this was the sole major departure from the letter of the outline but also because, in transferring the historic sites from the historic narrative to the central historic imaginary section of the exhibition, this change, rather than modifying its spirit, dramatically clarified and intensified the historic encoding of the whole exhibition. Isolated from the documentary section, the two offices revealed retroactively the historic protagonist of the exhibition (Il Popolo d’Italia), while at the same time framing the MRF’s historic imaginary section. This way they connoted the central space of the exhibition as a visualization of the fascist historic imaginary itself. Far from being either a symbolic recapitulation or an extension of the first fifteen rooms of the exhibition, the historic halls of the MRF represented a purely mental space – specifically the space of the fascist historic imaginary after the Revolution. In this mental space was to be found no more history, only historic semantics. Here, the regime itself was revealed as a mental state of historic presence. Here, the visitor was invited into the self-reflexive space of the fascist historic imaginary.

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Figure 24. Sironi’s Room R. The tabernacle containing Mussolini’s first office at Il Popolo d’Italia is visible under the large sign DUX.

Sironi encased Mussolini’s first office, the so-called Covo (den), in a tabernacle-like structure positioned at the north end of room R (Figure 24). At the four corners of this structure stood eight columns made of authentic rollers from the original Il Popolo d’Italia printing press. On the walls flanking the Covo the revolutionary dates 1919 and 1922 were carved in relief and topped by Mussolinian mottoes: ‘BELIEVE, OBEY,

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FIGHT,’ and ‘ORDER, AUTHORITY, JUSTICE.’ In front of the tabernacle, above the room’s colossal exit to room S, a gigantic red X jutted out, the ubiquitous sign of the tenth anniversary. Finally, on two flanking columns Sironi framed two gigantic enlargements of the front pages of Il Popolo d’Italia of 4 November 1918, and 31 October 1922, which announced, says the catalogue, ‘victory in war, and the revolutionary victory.’87 Read in the light of the preceding fifteen rooms, all the signs inscribed in this Hall of Honour spoke a loud and physical language to the spectator. This was the language of the epic hero that he or she had encountered throughout the exhibition: Il Popolo d’Italia. In spite of the explicit and repeated reference to the revolutionary dates 1919 and 1922 – inscribed also on all six faces of the tripartite exit – the reconstructed Covo (1914) and the enlargement of the front page that announced victory in the war (1918) demonstrated that the origin of the revolution transcended not only its historical dates but also its historical hero, Mussolini. The suspended and constricted representation of the Duce (DUX) as ‘fascista perfetto’ (perfect fascist, in Italian, rhymes with book and rifle, ‘libro e moschetto’) was a literal allegory that effectively depersonalized Mussolini’s supposed identification with the historic event. Il Popolo d’Italia quite simply, and with none of the allegorical overtones of the historic narrative section, was proposed here as the absolute guarantor of fascist historic agency, be it in its monumental form of regime or its simultaneous form of permanent revolution. The epic protagonist’s task, then as ever, was that of sustaining the immanent syntax of fascist historic imaginary; that is, the reciprocal immanence of the historic present of the regime (order, authority, and justice) and the historic infinitives of the revolution (to believe, to obey, to fight). The second historic site was located after Sironi’s room S (to which we will return in a moment), on the right-hand side of Longanesi’s Hall of Mussolini, right before the Shrine of the Martyrs (room U). Once again, its positioning was key to its encoding. Longanesi had divided the room into three spaces. As shown by this photograph, the left-hand and central rooms presented a series of rectangular window cases containing manuscripts, pictures, relics, and documents of Mussolini’s life, all selected by Mussolini himself and chronologically arranged by Longanesi (Figure 25). The sober classicism of these spaces, the white-lined framing of the window cases, and even the design of the diary quotes in the so-called Longanesi typeface and trim contrasted sharply with the

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Figure 25. Longanesi’s Room T seen from the entrance to the reconstructed last office of Mussolini at Il Popolo d’Italia.

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Figure 26. Mussolini’s last office at Il Popolo d’Italia.

materiality of Sironi’s sculpturing of volumes and masses, making room T purposely ‘historical.’ Indeed, as Bardi polemically remarked, room T was ‘deathly historical.’83 With their numerous documentary mementoes of the six failed attempts on Mussolini’s life framed by window cases resembling mortuary announcements, in a space dominated by sombre lighting and shaped like a coffin (see the map of the exhibition, Figure 16), the documentary spaces of Longanesi’s Hall of Mussolini could not have been more anticlimactic. Their aesthetic encoding referred explicitly to the mortality of the Duce, in sharp contrast with the final section of the room containing the reconstruction of Mussolini’s last office at Il Popolo d’Italia (Figure 26). As concluding signpost and vivid sign of the historic protagonist, this second historic site encoded the rest of the room as a historical representation under the sign of the historic. The contrast between the ‘historical’ picturing of the left-centre sections of the room and the enàrgeia of the reconstructed office made the semiotic relationship between the historic site and the historical representation palpable:

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the historical Mussolini could die at any time, but fascism/Mussolini as historic agency, that is, as both regime and permanent revolution, would survive – embodied in Il Popolo d’Italia that had always sustained it. Most plausibly, it was this last brief thought of Mussolini’s mortality that the Shrine of the Martyrs was supposed to transfigure in a synaesthetic representation of the fascist ritual par excellence, the appello (roll call). Entering room U, the visitor was surrounded by a thousand ‘presente!’ (‘here!’) (Figure 27). At the centre of this hemispherical room stood a seven-metre-high cross made of bolted copper plates like those of the façade’s fasces, inscribed with the invocation ‘for the immortal fatherland.’ Certainly this was a most reassuring transfiguration of fascism into the restorer of the cult of the fatherland. The fatherland was immortal; the fascist martyrs had died for it; the Shrine’s spectator was made into a potential martyr by his/her mental reading of both invocation and answer. Indeed, as several scholars have already highlighted, this grand finale stressed the mystical bond between the fascist leader and the fascist collective.84 Yet this was not the end of the MRF’s historic demostratio. Although last in the sequence of the nineteen rooms on the first floor, the Shrine (room U) was not the final room of the MRF’s historic itinerary. As the map shows (Figure 16), after visiting the Shrine, the visitor was forced to retrace his or her steps, pass through Mussolini’s room, and go through the Gallery of Fasces (room S) for a second time in order to exit the historic section and proceed to the upper floor, to the ‘accomplishment’ section of the exhibit. Indeed, Sironi’s Gallery of Fasces (room S) was the last room of the exhibition and its true historic climax. On either side of the gallery stood a row of five massive and cantilevered pilasters (Figure 28). According to the catalogue, their shape recalled that of the fascio, but Andreotti has rightly commented that ‘their reference was also to the gesture of the Roman salute.’85 On alternating fasces-pilasters were either the letters A or X: sequentially, this double sign stood for anno decimo (year ten), thereby unifying the ten pilasters. On the protruding face of the cantilevered part of each pilaster, the date of a revolutionary year was put in relief. From the left side as one entered the room they were 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1918; returning, on the spectator’s right side, from the exit toward the entrance, were the years 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, and ANNO I (first year). Finally, on the gallery-side faces of the mammoth pilasters dividing the pathway through the Hall of Honour, Sironi had again inscribed in relief the revolutionary dates par excellence, 1919 and 1922. The

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Figure 27. Room U. The ‘Shrine.’

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Figure 28. Room S. The Gallery of Fasces.

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appearance of this last set of dates before the spectator’s final exit from the exhibition suggests that the room was also designed to be read backwards – that is, coming back from the Shrine and through the Hall of Mussolini. Indeed, from the photograph published in the catalogue we may further infer that this second passage through the room was integral to Sironi’s conception of the gallery (Figure 29). This backward passage was the crucial one since it allowed a dramatic glance at the Covo and the fascista perfetto, both framed by the two dates (1919 and 1922). The traffic of visitors to and from this seventeenth and final room of the exhibition’s first floor must have been very heavy. It probably made the framed view of the Covo shown by the photograph quite hard to obtain. Nonetheless, the design of this room suggests that ‘framing’ was at the centre not only of Sironi’s concerns with the visitor’s experience, but also of the artist’s own conceptualization of the gallery in specific reference to the rhetorical encoding of the exhibition. It was in fact this passageway that the two historic sites in rooms R and T framed as the ‘spiritual hub and hermeneutic key’ of the MRF.86 In this crucial respect, the entire design of this gallery reveals not only an intimate connection with Alfieri’s directions but also a specific source of inspiration: Monti’s Gallery of Uniforms at the Mostra garibaldina. We do not know when Sironi decided to carry out the final design of room S, nor can we establish any direct influence on the artist’s choice from Monti. However, much circumstantial evidence suggests that, during the installation phase of the exhibition, the collaboration between Monti and Sironi became very close.87 In addition, we do know that Sironi dedicated a great amount of time to this room, and that its preparatory sketches show a complete change of mind between an early asymmetrical scheme and the final solution adopted.88 In any case, Sironi’s pilasters captured and expanded upon the historic spirit of Monti’s series of uniformed mannequins. In fact, judging from the results, Sironi had not only learned Monti’s lesson, but successfully surpassed his predecessor. Unlike Monti’s ‘Gallery of Uniforms’ in the MG, Sironi’s ‘Gallery of Fasces’ was not isolated but framed between the two historic sites of the exhibitions. It thus provided the semiotic key not only to the rooms that followed it, but also to those that preceded it – in a word, to the whole exhibition. Most plausibly, in fact, it was with Sironi’s room S in mind that Margherita Sarfatti defined the MRF as a ‘demonstration’ incommensurable to the ‘Mostra’ that had preceded it. Let us assume for the moment that, on first passage, the visitor, struck by the mystical atmosphere of the room, failed to notice the synthesis of

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Figure 29. Return view of the Hall of Mussolini through the Gallery of Fasces.

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dates and proceeded speedily toward the Sala del Duce. Having reached the Shrine, he or she would have been forced to retrace his or her steps through the brief stretch of the Hall of Mussolini and down the long corridor of the Gallery of Fasces. Short of realizing a fascist prototype of sublime architecture, this final inverted itinerary (U–T–S) must have drawn a response from the visitor. In particular, if, as Schnapp comments, the visitor encountered in the first passage through the Gallery of Fasces ‘the inner chamber of some sort of latter-day Assyrian temple,’ returning through the gallery the visitor was re-exposed to Sironi’s placement of dates, whose historic encoding could only be read during this final passage.89 While on his or her right-hand side the initiated visitor could backtrack through the five years of the war act (1918–1917– 1916–1915–1914), on the left-hand side, he or she would proceed through the four years of the revolutionary act (1919–1920–1921–1922), all the way to the ANNO I of the fascist era. This second passage through the room acquired all the characteristics of a final rite of passage, a definitive initiation into the historic temporality of the fascist epoch. While the very physical effect of seeing unknown faces going forward and backward in time may have made the historic encoding of the exhibition a phenomenological reality for most visitors, the most attentive ones would have noticed the temporal incongruity between the gallery and the exhibition as a whole. In the gallery, the revolutionary period symbolically represented was of ten years (1914–ANNO I), while in the exhibition it was of nine (1914–1922). In what sense, then, did the gallery constitute an ‘elementary synthesis of the period reconstructed by the Exhibition,’ as the catalogue claims?90 It certainly did not do so in a literal sense, since nowhere on the ground floor did the exhibition reveal the intention to reconstruct or represent in any way the first year (ANNO I) of the fascist era. Nor could it have formed such a synthesis in even any symbolic sense, since the repetitive sameness of the pilasters contradicted both the individuality of each year and the synaesthetic crescendo enacted throughout the exhibition. The only answer is: in a self-referential sense. Completing the series of ten pilasters, the ANNO I referred to the ‘X’ sign of the decennale ubiquitous in the perimetral section of the exhibition. Like faithful fascist soldiers of the revolution, the revolutionary years had taken their place within a new and solely fascist (modernist/Latin Catholic) unit of historic time: the decade. Far from synthesizing the exhibition, then, the Gallery of Fasces offered a self-referential imago of a fascist historic imaginary that had superseded the ‘revolutionary’ one by

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imposing the temporal form of the decennale on time itself. And with the gallery the MRF itself concluded its historic itinerary by replacing its historic protagonist in representation (Il Popolo d’Italia) with an historic imago in consciousness (the decade) that allowed the definitive perceptual detachment of the fascist historic imaginary from Mussolini’s perishable body. In so doing, however, the gallery also pushed the process of depersonalization wished for by the organizers far beyond the original intention of foregrounding only Mussolini’s personality. In effect, the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution depersonalized the historic Duce himself, first into his allegorical double – Il Popolo d’Italia – and then into the historic tempo (time/act/period) of the decade. This, then, is what the historic demonstration truly celebrated, the transfiguration of the historic Duce into a stylized unit of historic time. While providing a sensational closing act to the cinquantenario-decennale historic spectacle, the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution also took the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary to a final level of abstraction. From the point of view of the fascist sacralization of politics, the historic exhibition provided a crucial point of intersection between the spontaneous cult of the Duce and the organized cult of fascism. As the regime’s measure of a modernist annulment of time, the mental image of the decade offered an imaginary solution to fascism’s most agonizing problem: the tension between the mortality of Mussolini’s body and the seeming immortality of the cult of the Duce. Yet superseding the transfiguration of the Duce Taumaturgo into fascist historic agent, the decade also identified the fascist historic imaginary with a stylization of time. And, in so doing, the MRF brought to fruition and revealed what none of the previously analysed expressions of the fascist historic imaginary could: the ‘normative’ conception of style that had sustained the fascist aesthetization of politics in general, and the formation of the fascist historic imaginary in particular. As Mussolini’s aesthetic conception of politics made abundantly clear from the beginning, the aesthetic horizon of fascism was not that of creating a specific style in art, in the descriptive sense of creating a fascist style, meaning a distinctive union of form and content identifiable as fascist. Fascism sought to affirm itself as style tout court, in the ‘normative’ sense defined by Ernst Gombrich as entailing, on the side of the artist-politician, the search for a ‘synaesthetic’ impact activating in the viewer processes of analogic association and, on the side of the audience, the perception of a ‘consistency and conspicuousness that makes a performance or an artifact – or, we may add, a political movement –

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stand out from a mass of “undistinguished” events and objects.’91 As several studies have already documented, the evolution of fascist aesthetic politics, from the founding Mussolinian myth of ‘homo autotelos’ to the endorsement of the futurist ‘rhetorics of virility’ was founded on this normative conception of style and aimed at ‘giving distinction’ to Italians.92 Situated at its centre of propulsion, the fascist historic imaginary fulfilled this normative utopia of ‘distinction’ by producing ever-changing images of fascist history making. And although this normative notion of style emerged historically with futurism,93 and found its political incarnation in Mussolini’s definition of the fascist project as one aimed at giving style to the Italian masses, it was in the synaesthetic crescendo of the MRF that fascist normative style found its most mature and complete expression.94 No wonder, then, that the normative impulse sustaining the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary would find definitive expression in the stylization of time operated by the decennale-decade. And with this stylization of time, the MRF itself came to play a dramatic role in the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary in the 1930s. Offering a perfect hybrid of futurist and Latin Catholic temporal imaginaries, the stylized image of the decade brought to an abrupt end the orientation of the fascist historic imaginary toward ‘history belonging to the present.’ Like a tight-rope walker balancing between ritual and myth, in the second decade of the regime the fascist historic imaginary would balance between ‘history belonging to the future’ and ‘the present belonging to the past.’

Chapter Six

FASCIST HISTORIC CULTURE

That all historical museums, and in particular all museums of Risorgimento are in urgent need to be brought up to date and modernized, and that, above all, we all need to work in order to infuse life into so many memories of the past is no longer news. The possibility and the necessity of doing so, is exactly what the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution has demonstrated. Antonio Monti, 19331

In ten years Europe will be fascist or fascistized. Benito Mussolini, 19322

These statements, by two men very unequal in status but equal as principal protagonists of fascist history making, provide a fitting point of departure to reflect on the reception of the MRF by contemporaries and its impact on the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary in the second decade of the regime.3 The first quote is taken from a talk given by Monti at the Third Congress of Fascist Intellectuals held in Milan in March 1933. The second is the first sentence that Mussolini reportedly uttered when exiting the MRF after his inaugural visit to the exhibition on 29 October 1932. The first shows Monti’s acknowledgment of the MRF as the demonstration that a fascist mode of historic representation had been finally achieved and should now inform the revisioning of all history museums. Mussolini’s statement marks the immediate transfiguration of the fascist unit of historic time, the decade, into prediction, and epochal plan.4 Taken in tandem, these two authoritative comments confirm that, for its protagonists, the MRF constituted not only the rep-

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resentational apex of the cinquantenario-decennale historic spectacle, but also, and above all, a historic event in its own right that had superseded the revolutionary one it ostensibly celebrated (the March on Rome). Yet, for Monti, the MRF offered a ‘model’ of representation that could now be successfully applied to all past time. For Mussolini, the historic mostra had instead produced a temporal imago (the decade) to orient the fascist historic imaginary toward the future – as if from then on fascism would stake its historic agency on making the future, rather than the past, present. Thus, in the space between Monti’s expectations and Mussolini’s prophecy we also catch a glimpse of the MRF’s excessive historic figuration – that is, of a constitutive tension between the reception of the MRF as a model of historic representation to be applied to the past and as imago of a new historic imaginary oriented toward the future. Contradicting the celebrated aesthetic-ideological unity of the event, it was this tension that granted the MRF a decisive impact on the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary itself in 1930s Italy. Historic Model or Imago? Fortunately, as we know, Mussolini’s prediction was not realized. Nevertheless, the historic image of the decade pervaded fascist discourse in the 1930s, thus demonstrating a very material impact of the MRF on the evolution of the fascist imaginary. Unencumbered by either a racial or a social utopia, fascism continued to wager its stylistic claim to ‘absolute distinction’ on the visionary plane of being the sole historic agent that made history. The historic decade thus came to constitute the fascistmodernist answer to the utopian time of fascism’s totalitarian rivals: the messianic ‘one thousand years’ Reich of Nazism and the revolutionary ‘five year plans’ of the Bolsheviks. Naturally, this was a response typical of a regime and an intellectual class made up of expert journalists who could not dispense with the overproduction of signs. Yet the institutionalization of this answer at the level of ritual- and image-politics was intimately dependent on the reception of the MRF and on the fate that awaited Monti’s proposal. Judging from all available indicators of mass reception – from the unforeseen extension of its installation from three months to two years, to its more than 3,850,000 visitors, the number of reviews and books, and the public comments made by highly visible politicians, in-tellectuals, and artists (both in Italy and abroad) – the MRF greatly exceeded all predictions of success.5 Most recent studies of the exhibition have

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connected this excessive success primarily to its artistic value, highlighting the MRF’s paradigmatic visualization of fascist modernism achieved in the perimetric itinerary. Whether reduced to a Sironian,6 futurist,7 or rationalist8 imprinting, or enlarged to a ‘Fascist Gesamtkunstwerk of pathos, myth, and power,’9 the eclectic synthesis of avant-garde aesthetics in the MRF has been seen as the quintessential expression of the fascist aestheticization of politics. However, little attention has been given from this perspective to the fact that the immediate impact of the MRF for many contemporaries was also related to its documentary value. As Monti had anticipated, the exhibition of the decennale overcame in both representation and mass appeal all of its mass media rivals, including the LUCE documentaries, ‘which illustrated the accomplishments of the regime each year.’10 In fact, signs that part of the exhibition’s appeal resided in its unique mode of documentary representation are scattered everywhere in the dozens of articles and reviews that appeared within a few weeks of the opening of the exhibition. Most significantly, as we have already seen in the special case of Sarfatti’s, it is primarily in the reviews of art and architectural critics that we may find clear signs of a decoding of the rhetorical strategy pursued by the MRF organizers. Writing in the pages of the prestigious architectural journal Casabella, Camillo Pifferi identified the historic protagonist of the exhibition in the clearest terms: Of all the sculptural reliefs in the various rooms, the inscriptions [scritte] constitute the dominant and principal element: they are the very ‘substance’ of the exhibition. The documents are necessarily analytical, and their examination is laborious. Through them history unfolds slowly and in small steps. The colossal inscriptions, on the other hand, synthesize the facts, establish the main points, energize the essential elements, never forgetting the purely sculptural problems of form, space, and surface, and resolving them in a unified mode of expression.

Supporting Alfieri’s indication that Mussolini’s personality be made present to the visitor’s eyes through the physical sign of Il Popolo d’Italia, Pifferi further recognized that on the walls of each and every room Mussolini’s thought is pounded forth, powerfully and continuously; sometimes with force, sometimes rhythmically, sometimes minutely, machine-gun-like. Nothing else could have given

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with more vividness and immediacy the sensation that in any moment of Fascism everything had been thought out and willed by the Duce.11

Finally, the article proceeded with a room-by-room review of the different ways in which the scritte (mural writings) had worked to signify the events to which they referred. Piffieri’s review was unique in its detailed description of the modernist scene of enàrgeia enacted in the perimetric section of the exhibition, but, with respect to its rhetorical savvy, it was not unique. On the contrary, his evaluation of the MRF’s historic demonstration was echoed not only in most other art and architectural reviews, but also in those of historians. ‘The documents,’ Ugo D’Andrea wrote in the Giornale d’Italia, began appearing inside their display cases, and the posters on the walls, producing a quality that at first seems absurd. It takes an effort to get oriented, to push one’s memory back to the events. All of the sensations, at first, are artistic: they are caused by the completely changed architectural environment. But, then, all of a sudden, from one of the walls comes a shout: WAR! WAR! in bold capitals. At this precise moment all of the artistic sensations leave you, and you are returned to fact; to the bare facts of our recent history.12

Another historian, Francesco Sapori, asked himself: ‘Where does the document end? Where does the decoration begin? Aren’t they, decoration and document, here united?’ His answer was as perceptive as Piffieri’s: the plates of zinc, the helmets of the fallen, the manganelli (fascist clubs), the bloody knives, are all aimed at revealing the secret connection between the typography and the hall of weapons, the photographic laboratory and the museum of flags. The Il Popolo d’Italia masthead visible everywhere vibrates and summons to mind the immutable colours of the flag, and the rhythmic sound of the machine-gun that wipes out the enemy around you.13

Surely these explicit approvals of his successful catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act by both art critics and historians must have pleased Monti, but it was probably in the words of a militant journalist, Paolo Orano, that one can find the most synthetic recognition of the rhetorical codes that guaranteed the exhibition’s mass appeal. From the ‘bold characters of Mussolini’s articles in Il Popolo d’Italia,’ Orano wrote, ‘all

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Italians had learned that soon the Word was to become Flesh.’14 Specifically, Orano’s ‘bold characters’ were those appearing along the walls of Monti’s ‘Victory room.’ Here the Catholic principle of invisibilia per visibilia had begun to be transfigured in its modernist obverse, visibilia per invisibilia, recoding the immanent spell of the written word in its mystical/material sense of scripture. In fact, hundreds of other reviews written by fascism’s most faithful echoed the Catholic mystical tone of Orano’s. Connected to the ritual symbolism inscribed in the central section of the exhibition and the spontaneous and orchestrated rituals that developed around the MRF in the two years it remained open (October 1932–October 1934), testimonies such as Orano’s have led some scholars to highlight the ‘ritual-religious’ over the ‘aesthetic’ encoding of the exhibition.15 In particular, Emilio Gentile has forcefully argued that the MRF constituted the first ‘temple’ of the fascist faith.16 Rather than enthroning fascist modernism, for Gentile the MRF directed the evolution of fascist art toward ‘monumentality,’ and subordinated it to the construction of ‘monuments and temples’ aimed at eternalizing the ‘age of Mussolini.’17 According to this perspective, a determinant impulse was given with the MRF to all fascist artists, ‘whatever their artistic orientation – whether it was to repeat the classical models of traditional Romanity or to seek out a Fascist “modernity” – to create works designed to propagandize Fascist religion.’18 In contrast to the proponents of the MRF as a quintessential model of the fascist aestheticization of politics, Gentile’s interpretation of the MRF as imago of the fascist sacralization of politics focuses primarily on the central section of the exhibition. Both perspectives, however, seem to have avoided confronting the excessive figuration that characterized both the event and its reception.19 Looking more closely at Orano’s review of the MRF, for example, the explicit reference to the ‘bold characters of Il Popolo d’Italia’ suggests a specific recognition of the way in which the perimetric itinerary of the MRF had intertwined historic semiotics with a modernist visualization of their Catholic rhetorical core. Orano’s testimony on the ‘scriptural’ spell of ‘newspaper characters’ thus points to the inextricable mixture of aesthetic modernism and Catholic rhetorical codes in the formation of the fascist historic imaginary. In fact, if we cannot go further than suggesting that the concordant decoding of the MRF by art and architectural critics, militant historians, and fascist journalists captured the essence of its mass appeal, we can surely establish that this decoding was shared by Mussolini himself and the fascist establishment.

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Between 11 November 1932 and 10 January 1933 the Lavoro fascista had begun publishing weekly descriptions of every room of the exhibition. The initiative, however, was not followed by other dailies but halted from above because of its inherent contradiction with the paradigmatic quality of the MRF’s mode of representation. The head of Mussolini’s press office, Gaetano Polverelli, issued a directive in which, explicitly citing the bad example of the Lavoro fascista’s descriptive style, invited all newspapers to abandon the traditional look and content of their articles and to liven things up with bold graphics and fotocomposizioni (photographic collages).20 The exhibition’s celebration of revolutionary journalism was not to become dull by an inadequate response on the part of the very press it celebrated. By early February, most newspapers had begun to adopt the recommended practices. Moreover, the authoritative intervention of the historic protagonist itself rectified the ‘bad example’ of the Lavoro fascista. Before the exhibition catalogue was actually published, Il Popolo d’Italia had begun publishing Freddi’s description of the exhibition. Within six months, most of the catalogue entries and photographs had been disseminated, and a faint glimpse of the exhibition’s catastrophe of the histor(iographi)cal act became available even to those who had not, as yet, attended the event. It was therefore in this most favourable context of reception that, in March 1933, Antonio Monti made public his proposal to revise all historical museums according to the MRF’s historic mode of representation before an audience that could not have been more receptive and authoritative. This was the public in attendance of the Third National Congress of Fascist Intellectuals, among whom figured prominently some of the principal agents we have encountered in this study, Giovanni Gentile (President-founder of the National Institute of Fascist Culture, and Chair of the Congress), Gioacchino Volpe, and Dino Alfieri. Before this audience, Monti explained that the MRF’s mode of representation could easily be employed to revitalize all historical museums since it consisted of a single revolutionary criterion born of the fusion of three elements: [First] the exhibition of the proper documentary items with specific technical devices that put them in emphasis. [Second] the framing of these items in the photographic, iconographic, and theatrical reproduction of the places and events to which they refer, including, always, the changes in public opinion. [Third] the spiritual valourization and coordination of the first two elements with the reproduction of thoughts, mottoes, principles

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which are linked to the documentation by relations of cause and effect, thought and action.21

That Monti’s description of the MRF’s criterion synthesized precisely the narrative scene of enàrgeia we have encountered in the perimetric section of the MRF is confirmed by the examples he gave, all drawn from Freddi’s arrangement of rooms A and B. That this criterion represented also the climax (theoretical, aesthetical, and rhetorical) of his history-making activities in the 1920s we may further infer from the examples he drew from his own museum to demonstrate its immediate applicability. Why Monti’s proposals instead failed to draw the support of his long-standing ally and powerful patron, Dino Alfieri, is a puzzle whose close reading opens a window onto the productive tension inscribed at the heart of the MRF’s double itinerary. Invited by Gentile himself to express his opinion, Alfieri reminded Monti of the two ‘secrets’ that had ensured the success of the MRF but had also made its mode of representation unexportable. ‘The first secret’ Alfieri explained, ‘is the chronological-historical itinerary of the events that pass in front of the eyes and the spirit of the visitor; the second secret – which is for me the crucial one – is that I have used Mussolini’s thought as the Ariadne’s thread connecting all the events, from the eruption of war to the March on Rome. His thought appears in principle everywhere, and even when it is not materially visible, it is present to the eyes of the visitor. This is the plot (trama) upon which historians and artists have built in their work.’ As if his explanation were not clear enough, Alfieri insisted that the representation enacted in the MRF was entirely dependent on the fact that each of Mussolini’s sentences had proven to be literally ‘historic,’ since ‘although referring to different topics, all of them were repeated in different periods’ demonstrating ‘a continuity of thought and a prophetic power which are truly miraculous.’ This was, he added, not extendable to Risorgimento museums. In fact, Alfieri concluded, reminding Monti of his own curatorial role in the exhibition, ‘I have wanted – we have wanted – to maximize the depersonalization of the exhibition, guarding against all underground and sleek maneuvers intended to counter this principle, so that from the ensemble and the progression of this historical-political musicality (as I have sometimes called it), the personality of Benito Mussolini would be uniquely foregrounded.’22 Although unnamed, in Alfieri’s secrets we may recognize immediately a crucial referent that made them unreconciliable with Monti’s criterion.

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Alfieri affirmed that the rhetorical encoding and synaesthetic crescendo of the exhibition could not be divorced from its historic protagonist: Il Popolo d’Italia. Thanks to the sensory-visual encoding of its characters in the perimetric itinerary of the exhibition, Il Popolo d’Italia had assumed the crucial role of imago of fascist historic agency and guaranteed the phenomenological experience of a fascist historic imaginary in the making. The inherently, infinitely reproducible, combinable, cuttable, enlargeable, retranscribable printing blocks of the newspaper press had thus allowed the production of a modernist scene of enàrgeia, but, for Alfieri, there was no turning back from this scene to the pre-fascist past. United from the 1928 planning of the exhibition through to its organization and installation in 1933, Monti and Alfieri found themselves separated in the evaluation of their masterpiece. Their contradictory decoding highlighted the tension, inscribed in the double itinerary of the exhibition, between the reception of the MRF as model of historic representation (perimetric section) and imago of a new form of fascist historic imaginary (central section). For Monti, the MRF’s mode of historic representation had produced a properly fascist model of historic semiotics, which, at last, made ‘possible and necessary’ the re-visioning of all historical museums. For Alfieri, the MRF was instead an imago that sanctioned the reciprocal immanence of fascist style and historic imaginary, thereby preventing its application to the pre-fascist past. That the unforeseen contrast between Monti and Alfieri puzzled their audience we may plausibly infer from the embarrassment and lack of debate that followed Alfieri’s rebuttal.23 However, that these antithetical positions derived from the excessive historic figuration of the MRF we may positively evince from the very real impact that the exhibition had on the institutionalization of the new historic imaginary it celebrated. It was, in fact, in the sudden and rapid regimentation of fascist historical culture between 1932 and 1934 that the tension between the MRF as imago and model found its first expression and lasting articulation in the second decade of the regime. The Historic Exhibition and the Fascist Reclaiming of History Approving Monti’s ‘lucid concepts and precise proposals,’ the 1933 Congress of Fascist Intellectuals nonetheless recommended that the reorganization of the museums of the Risorgimento be entrusted to ‘artists of our fascist time and spirit.’24 This solution was hardly a victory for either Monti or Alfieri. Neither of the two wished for an all-out aestheti-

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cization of history of the kind proposed by the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals. Yet, the very awkwardness of the compromise approved by the congress draws our attention to the deeper cleavage produced by the MRF in the structure of the fascist historic imaginary. In fact, nothing of the sort wished for by the congress took place in 1930s Italy, either through the hands of artists or those of historian-curators like Monti. On the contrary, compared to the continuity we have encountered between the actualist philosophy of history, the ritual politics of the regime, and the image-making activities of militant intellectuals and artists in the 1920s, the panorama offered by the evolution of fascist historic culture during the second decade of the regime appears profoundly and suddenly discontinuous with this picture. Anticipating similar processes that gradually developed in other cultural areas, historical studies were the first field to undergo radical reinstitutionalization, centralization, and ideological supervision. The principal agent in the wholesale regimentation of fascist historical culture was not one of the protagonists we have already encountered, but one of the four organizers of the March on Rome itself: Cesare Maria De Vecchi. A militant monarchist and ultra-conservative Catholic, De Vecchi had been kept outside the inner circles of both party and state between 1923 and 1928, when he had been governor of Italian Somalia.25 Thanks to his close relations with the Vatican, he was recalled to Italy in 1928 and given the post of ambassador to the Holy See after the Lateran Pacts (1929). From this delicate position De Vecchi rebuilt alliances and a close relationship to Mussolini, serving as mediator between the Vatican and the fascist state in the numerous conflicts that characterized the application of the Pacts. His eye, however, soon fell on the cultural dimension that underpinned the political struggle between the fascist state and Catholic organizations. Indeed, it was De Vecchi who, between 1929 and 1932, most consistently tried to convince Mussolini to retreat from his intention to build a monument to Anita Gari-baldi on the Janiculum Hill and give unprecedented national exposure to the Garibaldian celebrations.26 As shown in chapter three, De Vecchi’s attempts to scale down the Garibaldian celebrations were unsuccessful; nevertheless, he began directing his attention in this period to the wider field of Risorgimento studies and institutions, which he considered in dire need of ideological realignment with ‘the spirit of the Concordat.’27 In this field, De Vecchi achieved full success. In March 1933, Mussolini designated him president of the Italian National Society for the Study of the Risorgimento

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(INSRI), which had been founded in 1906 and left virtually untouched in its organizational and operational structure during the first decade of the fascist regime. Confident of his Mussolinian mandate, De Vecchi proceeded immediately to restructure all aspects of the INSRI and transform it into the Royal Institute for Risorgimento Studies (RIRS). Approving the operation, Mussolini made De Vecchi minister of culture in 1935, a position that he held for a year and used primarily to introduce legislative mechanisms aimed at ensuring central direction and control over all Italian historical institutions. By the end of De Vecchi’s ‘bonifica fascista della storia’ (fascist reclaiming of history), all areas of Italian history, from ancient Rome to the Great War, found themselves regimented and parcelled out to one or the other of the Royal Institutes (for Antiquity, the Middle Ages, Modern and Contemporary History, and the Risorgimento) created by De Vecchi, and all pre-existing and nongovernmental institutions were put under the authority of a Central Committee for Historical Studies.28 The sudden ascent of De Vecchi to the highest spheres of the regime’s organization of culture was certainly connected to the general decline of Gentile’s intellectual-political stardom and organizational role after the Concordat and, in particular, to the decreasing ideological influence of his ‘Risorgimental paradigm.’29 In fact, the deciding struggle between Gentile and De Vecchi took place over the latter’s ‘reclaiming’ of the Risorgimento. From mid-1932 this struggle configured itself as an attempt by both contenders to control the INSRI and unify it with its independent sister institution, the National Committee for Risorgimento Studies (NCRS). Gentile, however, launched the first bid at the twentieth congress of the INSRI, held in Rome between 29 and 31 May. Here, together with Volpe, Gentile forcefully denounced the disconnection between Risorgimento studies and the spirit of fascism, recommending a scientific modernization of the INSRI aimed at inviting all historians to widen their vision. In essence, for Gentile, the new task of the institute was to direct historians to trace the origins of the Risorgimento to the eighteenth century in order to ‘unburden [the Risorgimento] from its ideal servitude to the French Revolution.’30 Initially Volpe and Gentile won over a majority of the congress to their theses, but notwithstanding this support, by March 1933 De Vecchi had manoeuvred successfully and obtained from Mussolini himself the mandate to harmonize the National Society for Risorgimento Studies with the Regime’s directives.31 De Vecchi’s harmonization entailed a much more radical and rapid restructuring of the INSRI than the one

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outlined by Volpe and Gentile in mid-1932. He proceeded to purge Risorgimento scholarship of all un-fascist elements and then put all Risorgimento institutions under the authority of the RIRS in 1935, of which he retained the presidency and tight control until 1943. This control, in turn, ensured for De Vecchi a lasting reclamation of both Risorgimento studies and fascism from Gentile’s Risorgimental paradigm. Centralizing the institution and personally controlling its main scholarly review, De Vecchi successfully enforced the simultaneous realignment of Risorgimento scholarship with the Concordat and the alliance since 1922 between fascism and the Sabaudian Monarchy. Naturally, his Catholic-monarchist-militarist regimentation of the Risorgimento did not remain unchallenged. Gentile’s control over several journals and publishing houses continued to ensure a space of influence for his philosophical catastrophe of Risorgimento and fascism. Furthermore, Volpe never refrained from his historiographical attempts to dissolve the Risorgimento into the modern and contemporary history of Italy, whose Royal Institute he continued to direct in the 1930s. Yet the rapidity, effectiveness, and ideological impact of De Vecchi’s reclaiming of Risorgimento studies had no parallels in other cultural areas. Focusing on the personal antagonism between De Vecchi and Gentile and the ideological polarization that characterized all aspects of their visions of fascist culture, several scholars have seen in their struggle for the control of Risorgimento studies a dress rehearsal for the culture wars that tore the actualist fabric of fascist intellectual culture in the mid-1930s.32 In hindsight, De Vecchi’s victory over Gentile has thus appeared as the first stage of a conjoined ‘statalization’ of Italian culture and ‘fascistization’ of its contents.33 These processes have generally been seen as reflecting the interventionist role assumed by the PNF in shaping fascist culture in the 1930s34 and as mirroring the increasingly reactionary path followed by the regime from the Concordat (1929), to the imperial conquest of Ethiopia (1935), to the Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany (1936).35 Yet, this narrative picture with the advantage of hindsight may have paid too little attention to the timing and agents involved in the first stage of the fascist reclaiming of culture. In the first place, De Vecchi’s reclaiming of Risorgimento studies was supported by a majority of Risorgimento historians precisely because it was perceived as preventing them ‘from falling into the hands of fascistoni [ultra-fascists]’ like Volpe and Gentile.36 Second, the PNF had nothing to do with the resolution of the contest between Gentile and De Vecchi. It was Mussolini himself who, in March 1933, decided the issue

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in favour of De Vecchi. Third, and most importantly, despite the undeniable contrasts between De Vecchi’s and Gentile’s interpretative schemes, all the cardinal aspects of De Vecchi’s reclaiming of Risorgimento studies appeared in a contemporaneous project drafted by Gentile in March 1933 for the constitution of a ‘Fascist Institute for Risorgimento Studies.’37 Whether or not De Vecchi hijacked his rival’s plans, the two were certainly in accord in proposing a single centralized institution that would ‘prevent the birth of any autonomous initiative aimed at studying or celebrating the Risorgimento,’ ‘supervise all public archives and museums of the Risorgimento,’ and, last but not least, ‘extend the Risorgimental period to include the Great War.’38 Clearly, the whole process of reclaiming Risorgimento studies presents characteristics that do not fit the stereotyped image of a sharp dichotomy between the actualist hegemony in the 1920s and the fascistization of culture in the 1930s. In contrast, viewed from a microhistorical perspective, the timing of Mussolini’s intervention and the points of agreement between Gentile and De Vecchi acquire great significance in connection with the conjunctural context in which the fascist reclaiming of Risorgimento studies took place. This context, of course, is that of the cinquantenario-decennale historic spectacle and, more precisely, the period between the closing of the Garibaldian Exhibition on 31 May 1932, and the March 1933 Congress of Fascist Intellectuals that focused on the impact of the MRF on fascist culture. In June 1932, Volpe and Gentile seemed united in pushing back the historicization of the Risorgimento within a long-term European perspective intended to displace the French Revolution from its Kantian status of historical sign. In fact, the resolutions approved by the congress on 1 June in this crucial area of periodization concerned only the term a quo of the Risorgimento and not the ad quem term of the Great War. Within ten months, however, the situation would be reversed on all counts: despite their personal animosity, Gentile and De Vecchi centred their plans on the historiographical extension of the Risorgimento to include the Great War, and on excluding Volpe, de facto, from the reorganization of Risorgimento institutions and studies.39 As noted in the first chapter, the merging of Risorgimento, Great War, and fascism in a single epochal icon had always marked the philosophical distance between Volpe’s historicist conception of the continuity between fascism and the recent national past and Gentile’s Risorgimental paradigm. Yet what needs to be stressed in this context is that the emergence of this distance in Gentile’s 1933 plan also consti-

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tuted the central element of continuity between the actualist philosophy of history, De Vecchi’s fascist reclaimings, and the goal toward which Monti and his colleagues had addressed in vain their image-making activities from the mid-1920s onwards. At last, in March 1933, the Great War was not only assigned by law to the care of Risorgimento historians and museum directors, but also set for historic encoding. Whether or not the visit paid by all members of the twentieth congress of Risorgimento historians to Monti’s Garibaldian exhibition had any influence on changing the tide, De Vecchi’s Catholic-monarchistmilitarist reclaiming of the Risorgimento seemed to be lifted out of Monti’s gallery of uniforms. De Vecchi’s plan, as it were, extended the series of uniforms back to that of the first Piedmontese drummer (1730). Yet, if this resonance between Monti’s image-making activities and the historic imaginary harboured by Risorgimento historians may help explain the consensus that crystallized around De Vecchi’s reform, how do we explain Mussolini’s approval of De Vecchi’s plans, given the care he had put into preventing the compenetration of the Risorgimento, the Great War, and fascism in the Garibaldian celebrations? And how did this decision relate to the contemporaneous resolution (March 1933) taken by the Third Congress of Fascist Intellectuals (presided over by Gentile) that the Risorgimento was ready to be aestheticized by fascist artists? The simultaneity of these two apparently contradictory resolutions reveals a strong conjunctural connection between the reception of the MRF as imago, the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary, and De Vecchi’s reclaiming of Risorgimento studies. As argued in the previous chapter, the MRF had superseded not only Mussolini’s ritual politics in the Garibaldian celebrations but also the ‘revolutionary’ historic imaginary it had put on stage in its perimetric section. In other words, at the level of the imaginary, the MRF itself had come to replace the March on Rome as a historic event in its own right. The imago of a regime-historic orientated toward ‘history belonging to the future’ made the bond between the revolutionary historic imaginary and the Great War apt to be historicized and ‘regimented’ in a single Risorgimental icon. In fact, a confirmation of the combined impact that the MRF had on the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary and the fascist reclaiming of history may be found in the different destiny that awaited the two resolutions (of Mussolini and of the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals) in practice. Going well beyond the letter of both Mussolini’s decision and De Vecchi’s plans, the periodization of Risorgimento museums in the 1930s

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came to include not only the Great War but gradually extended all the way to the March on Rome itself.40 At the same time, the application of De Vecchi’s Catholic-monarchist paradigm extended the term a quo of the Risorgimento in the direction approved by the June congress (the eighteenth century), but it reinforced the epoch-making foundation of the Savoy Monarchy in 1730 rather than the insertion of the Risorgimento into a long-term European perspective desired by Volpe. In the 1930 Risorgimento museum the historic event of the ‘fascist revolution’ was thus diluted within a regimented Risorgimental epoch. By contrast, we can find no sign of either the application of the MRF’s model proposed by Monti or an ‘aestheticization’ of the kind proposed by the 1933 Congress of Fascist Intellectuals. The Risorgimental icon that permitted the regimented periodization of Italian history from the early eighteenth century to the March on Rome was also the sign that, with the MRF, the connection between fascist modernism and the revisioning of the history museum had been definitively severed. As the rapid institutionalization of all other areas of historical studies confirms, the ‘aesthetic’ impact of the MRF on the fascist reclaiming of history derived from the transfiguration of its imago into a model for the epochal regimentation of all periods of Italian history and their orientation toward the fascist future. Like the revolutionary years in Sironi’s pilasters, the fascist reclaiming of history gave past-time disciplined form and future orientation in the mental gallery of the fascist historic imaginary. As we shall see below, rather than severing all ties between the actualist philosophy of history, fascism, and historic semantics, the MRF’s excessive figuration spurred the institutionalization and regimentation of the fascist historic imaginary at all levels of ritual and image politics. Behind the ritual articulation of fascist religion and the culture wars that characterized the second decade of fascist dictatorship, we find the visionary horizon of a regime that intended to live in a perennial historic infinitive. Fascist Historic Culture The transfiguration of the MRF’s imago into a model of epochal regimentation of past-time anticipated and accompanied the coalescence of a regime aesthetics in architecture and the arts called stile littorio (lictoral style) in view of the inspiration it derived from Roman-classic aesthetics. As several scholars have remarked, the rise of stile littorio abruptly interrupted the triumphant procession of fascist modernism. Responding to the search for a new fascist aesthetics that would weave together

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the long-standing themes of romanità (Romanness) and italianità (Italianness) with the new discourses of empire and race, stile littorio gained ideological sanction and official endorsement with the fascist conquest of Ethiopia and the 1936 Pact of Steel with Nazi Germany.41 As Marla Stone has recently argued, during the second half of the 1930s most opponents of avant-garde aesthetics rallied around the banner of stile littorio, conducting a battle without quarters against ‘aesthetic pluralism and experimental fascist patronage.’42 The ensuing cultural wars between antimodernists and modernists were fought at all levels of fascist culture, from art and architectural production to critical discourse and state patronage of the arts. This battle for art, however, may have drawn too much attention to the equating of stile littorio with the ideological nazification of Italian fascism, leaving unexplored the fundamental connection of this battle to the institutionalization of a fascist historic culture. In the first place, we have recently learned that, despite the antimodernist climate dominating the second half of the 1930s, most Italian avant-garde movements were successful in presenting themselves as traditions of innovation and in resisting the accusations of internationalism and degeneracy coming from the stile littorio front.43 To begin with, futurism steadily gained the greatest number of affiliates in the 1930s, successfully organized itself into a semi-formal corporation, and loudly mobilized against all attempts to nazify fascist art and discourse. Developing, on the one hand, its own brand of Arte Sacra (sacred art), and fixing, on the other, its association with fascism and modernity through the spectacular expansion of ‘aero genres’ (Aero-pittura, Aero-scultura, Aero-poesia), Marinetti’s movement made all accusations of anti-religiosity and anarchism seem outdated and specious even after the inclusion of futurism in the infamous exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ organized by the Nazis in 1937.44 Parallel to futurism, Sironi’s novecento movement also acquired its simultaneously fascist modernist and traditionalist sanction in the 1930s with the rediscovery of the Italian traditions of fresco painting and mosaic. Sironi’s permanent abandonment of the bourgeois easel for the social and political art of murals was a move that did not prevent accusations of grotesque expressionism levied against it from all sides of the antimodernist camp. Nevertheless, the list of state and private commissions, which Sironi and his followers continued to obtain throughout the decade, made novecento an even more effective and direct competitor of stile littorio than futurism.45 Finally, it was only in the mid-1930s that the rationalist movement in architecture found

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the private and public commissions needed to defend itself from the accusation of ‘internationalism,’ by adding to its claim to modernity the fascist-imperial qualifier of being ‘Mediterranean.’46 Paralleling the complexity of fascist modernism in the 1930s, stile littorio was neither merely historical nor kitsch, nor, as Stone insists, an ‘update of the Roman imperial style’ alone.47 In the first place, none of the fascist official buildings constructed in stile littorio ever came close to the imperial neoclassicism of Albert Speer’s monumental undertakings. Second, even in painting stile littorio expressed a hybridization between past-time and fascist modernity that was irreducible to the frisson between petit bourgeois morality and death that was characteristic of Nazi kitsch.48 Finally, its manifestations were by no means limited to a compromise between architectural razionalismo and Romanness pursued by the prime regime architect Marcello Piacentini, but rather extended across a vast field of ritual and aesthetic forms.49 Stile littorio found expression in Mario Sironi’s modernist updating of pre-quattrocento fresco and the Byzantine mosaic,50 just as much as in the medieval resonance of Mussolini’s new towns and the urban modernization of old medieval towns.51 Furthermore, under its banner were found a host of PNF disposizioni (orders) aimed at unmaking all bourgeois components of Italians’ behaviour, dress, gestures, and language.52 Stile littorio was thus not limited to the celebration of Romanness per se, nor to the fascist art world. The static and monumental forms in which it found expression were not only signs of a definitive abandonment by the regime of the bourgeois patronage style it had adopted in the fascistmodernist 1920s, but also alternative and equally genuine expressions of the fascist conception of normative style put on stage by the MRF.53 Whatever its form, the hybridization of past and modernity, typical of all stile littorio expressions, was still meant to ensure a synaesthetic impact on the viewer and to claim collective distinction rather than forge identity. The pre-bourgeois epochs grafted onto fascist art, architecture, and symbols gave epochal presence to past-time, thereby eternalizing the historic infinitive of the regime. Paralleling De Vecchi’s reclaiming of history, stile littorio contributed to the cutting of all ties between the regime and historical semantics, as well as the revolutionary historic imaginary superseded by the MRF. This process, in fact, was nowhere better instanced than in the fateful museification of the fascist revolution itself. On 20 November 1932, the president of the Roman Committee of the INSRI, Marquis Piero Misciatelli, requested of Mussolini that the documents displayed in the MRF be transferred, after its closing, to the

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National Museum of the Risorgimento, housed in the Roman Altar to the Fatherland (Vittoriano). There, in the symbolic hub of the cult of the fatherland, these documents would have testified that ‘between the Risorgimento, the Great War, and fascism, there exists an ideal continuity which can be clearly delineated.’ Quite predictably, Mussolini’s answer was negative, but already at this early stage, it alluded to the likely transformation of the MRF into a ‘Permanent Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ to be housed in the future headquarters of the party.54 At the exhibition’s closing in October 1934 the relics and a small part of its figurative elements were stored in the Roman Gallery of Modern Art, to await the construction of their highly symbolic destination: the Palazzo Littorio that was to house both the fascist revolution and the fascist party, and was to be built on Via dell’Impero, the newly opened artery that connected the Piazza Venezia, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum. The highly publicized national competition for the design of the Palazzo Littorio constituted possibly one of the earliest and most important episodes in the culture wars between stile littorio and fascist modernism.55 Yet by 1936, after two selection rounds, in which the best artists and architects in each group confronted one another and an equal number of winning designs were selected and publicly exhibited, only an uncomfortable standstill was achieved, followed by a wholesale depleting of the project’s symbolic capital. In early 1937, the commission selected out of the winning designs the purest and most literal example of stile littorio, by architect Enrico Del Debbio. This victory, however, resulted in a doubly symbolic loss for the antimodernist faction. In the first place, the palace, stile littorio, and the PNF with them, were all relegated to the outskirts of Rome, in the Foro Mussolini, at the very same time as an ultra-rationalist exhibition space was being built in the heart of fascist Rome, on the ancient sport-field of the Circo Massimo.56 Secondly, the triumph of stile littorio in the competition was dwarfed by the fact that the Palazzo Littorio would not host the Permanent Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, which was destined to experience an interrelated but altogether different fate. On 23 September 1937, a revised edition of the MRF opened in the late-nineteenth-century locale of the Gallery of Modern Art, at the same time as opened the Mostra augustea della romanità (MAR) (Exhibition of Augustan Rome), which was organized to begin the celebrations of the bimillennial anniversary of Emperor Augustus’ birth and was the centrepiece of a larger archaeological celebration of Roman civilization.57 Surely the simultaneous openings of the two exhibitions high-

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lighted their common reference to fascism’s modern claims to Mediterranean Imperium, but these ‘two Imperial exhibitions’ – as they were referred to in the fascist press – did not amount to either a reflection of fascism’s ‘backward-looking self-image,’ or a definitive sign of stile littorio’s victory over fascist modernism, as Stone puts it.58 On the contrary, read in connection with the contemporaneous construction of the Palazzo Littorio and the Circo Massimo exhibition-complex, the simultaneous openings of the second MRF edition and the MAR highlighted their complementary tensions and common relationship to the evolution of fascist historic culture.59 Divorced from its symbolic reference to the historic date of the revolution (27 October) and the modernist itinerary of the original version, the new edition of the MRF was no longer a demonstration, and not even a mostra, but a proper museum of the fascist revolutionary epoch. Inverting altogether Monti’s wishes, the new MRF was modelled after a traditional history museum in both aesthetic and temporal form. Gone were not only the entire central historic section of the 1932 edition, but also the modernist-fascist Gesamtkunstwerk. Neither the historic protagonist of the original MRF, nor the depersonalization process that had characterized its visualization of fascist historic agency, nor the aesthetic-rhetorical crescendo of its itinerary, had survived in its second edition. In their place was a didactic display dominated by flat figurations separated from the relics and documents, a neat periodization, and the highlighting of single figures: Mussolini, of course, above all, but also Gabriele D’Annunzio and Guglielmo Marconi.60 Yet, all this was inserted into a temporal-spatial expansion of the revolutionary event, which embraced past and present in epochal form without discontinuity.61 Although the historic section of the original MRF had disappeared from the latter edition, its imago had effectively functioned as the latter’s historic director. In the 1937 edition of the MRF ‘history belonging to the present’ was reversed into ‘the present belonging to history.’ The aesthetic form of past-time (the museum) was literally grafted onto the celebration of the fascist revolutionary epoch, building a line of continuity between the new MRF and the party headquarters under construction in stile littorio’s ‘theme park,’ the Foro Mussolini.62 By contrast, the museification of the MRF threw in sharper relief the hybridization between fascist-modernist form and stile littorio achieved in its imperial companion, the Exhibition of Augustan Rome. Inserted in the celebratory context of the Augustan bimillennium, the MAR’s thematic focus on the identification of Imperial Rome and fascist modernity, and

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of Emperor Augustus and Mussolini, could not have been more clearly enunciated and monumentalized.63 Nevertheless, the MAR displayed as many traits of fascist modernism as of stile littorio, and many more signs of continuity with the original MRF than with its museumlike second edition. Set up in the same prestigious locale of the original MRF, the Palazzo delle esposizioni, the MAR institutionalized the connection between fascism and Romanness by expanding on the use of photographic techniques, scriptural elements, and seriality successfully experimented on in its revolutionary predecessor. First, all items exhibited in the MAR were either sophisticated photographic reproductions and photomontages, or plaster casts of monuments (including a huge one of Imperial Rome in the age of Constantine) reproduced in scale.64 Second, just as in the MRF, the main threads that connected the four sections into which the MAR was divided were the Mussolinian scritte plastered on the walls of most rooms or collected in room twenty-five, which was dedicated to ‘the immortality of the idea of Rome and its rebirth in the fascist Empire.’ This time, however, the sentences reproduced were not extracted from Il Popolo d’Italia but selected and sent by Mussolini himself to the exhibition’s organizer, Giulio Quirino Giglioli.65 In the MAR, the Duce personally and exclusively performed the catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act. To the architects and artists involved remained the task of transfiguring the serial notion of epochal time inscribed in Sironi’s Gallery of Fasces into architectural triptyches juxtaposing Roman and fascist insignia, triumphal arches, and trophies.66 Far from matching in aesthetic avant-gardism the original MRF, the MAR was nonetheless much more in line with its historic encoding and with the modernist Circo Massimo exhibition-complex than with either the fascist revolution museum or Del Debbio’s Palazzo Littorio. Grafting the exhibition form onto the imperial future of fascism, the MAR showed that stile littorio could fight the same war as fascist modernism against historical semantics and could participate in the modernist scenes of enàrgeia in which the MRF’s epochalization of future-time had found expression. It was, in fact, in the spectacular evolution of fascist exhibition culture in the later 1930s that we may clearly recognize the most lasting impact of the MRF and the most effective articulation of its excessive historic figuration. In the exhibition form of the MRF, fascist modernism found a mass medium of expression and a proper art form to sustain the orientation of the fascist historic imaginary toward ‘history belonging to the future.’

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Exhibition Art and Fascist Historic Culture If an art form were to be considered particularly representative of a fascist aesthetic in the 1930s, it would be none other than the art of organizing, assembling, and producing non-art exhibitions for a mass audience. As Marla Stone has thoroughly documented, the successful formula of the mass exhibition generated by the MRF was immediately endorsed, harnessed, and developed by the fascist leadership, which adapted it to an uninterrupted series of political theme exhibitions, ‘giving it its most diffused exposure to date.’67 Starting with the MRF’s ‘little sister,’ the Milanese Mostra aereonautica (MA) (1934), passing through the MAR (1937), the four exhibitions of the Circo Massimo (1937– 1939), and the Neapolitan Mostra d’oltremare (1940), and ending with the never-realized Universal Exhibition of Rome (1942), state-sponsored mass exhibitions effectively challenged the ‘most powerful weapon’ (cinema) suggested by Mussolini for the formation of the fascist man. With these mass-exhibitions, the fascist state contributed not only to bringing together avant-garde artists and architects, but also to steering them away from the bourgeois context of art exhibitions and toward mass exhibition itself as the modernist art form par excellence. Yet, according to Stone, the marriage between the fascist ‘Patron State’ and modernism was not to last beyond 1936.68 Unquestionably, the ‘apotheosis’ of fascist modernism and avantgarde aesthetics achieved in the Milanese Aereonautics Exhibition of 1934 was abruptly left behind in the evolution of the mass exhibition form.69 Nevertheless, Stone’s tragic narrative of the rise and fall of the fascist-modernist Gesamtkunstwerk may rely on too narrow a definition of the MRF’s formula and its impact. Reducing the MRF model to a mix of ‘avant-garde aesthetics, commercial tourism, and nationalism,’ and focusing only on state patronage of the arts, Stone’s discussion of the MRF’s impact on the evolution of fascist art culture misses the wider context of interaction between Italian exhibition culture as a whole and the ritual futurization of the fascist historic imaginary. As Mabel Berezin has documented, the plethora of spontaneous and orchestrated rituals that developed around the MRF in the two years it remained open marked a fundamental moment of transformation in the ‘ritual genre’ of commemoration. This genre had in fact been modelled after the yearly commemorations of the March on Rome and had pervaded fascist ritual culture in the 1920s. With the decennale’s ‘demonstrationcelebration’ there opened, instead, a phase of ritual ‘mobilizations’ that

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lasted until the end of the regime and was characterized by ritual events focused on the future rather than the past.70 Surely the frequency and ubiquity of fascist adunate (gatherings) in the middle and late 1930s affected the life of most Italians far more than the construction of local party headquarters or art competitions. ‘Ritual form,’ Berezin observes, ‘colonized time’ in 1930s fascist Italy.71 Yet this ritual colonization of time did not foster mere habituation to the regime. Rather, it interacted with its image politics counterpart, mass exhibitions, to forge a new historic habitus and a proper historic culture in the 1930s. United by a homologous articulation of the MRF’s excessive historic figuration, fascist ritual mobilizations and mass exhibitions sustained each other in orienting the fascist historic imaginary toward ‘history belonging to the future.’ Reading the evolution of state-sponsored mass-exhibitions in this larger context, we may capture a strong line of continuity between the expansion of the MRF’s formula in the Aereonautics Exhibition (1934) and the hybridization of stile littorio and fascist modernism in the Circo Massimo exhibition cycle. The MA offered an unrivalled symbolic unification of the MRF’s imago and model into the prime futurist icon, the airplane, which certainly suggested an ‘open reading of the future’ but also fixed a lasting identification of the exhibition form with futuretime.72 It is this futurist imprint, in fact, that we may still observe in the ‘simulations of non-present environments’ in which Stone identifies the originality of the Circo Massimo exhibition cycle (1937–39).73 And, most significantly, it is in the words of the very art director of the Aereonautics Exhibition, Mario Pagano, that we find a theoretical elucidation of this futurist continuity, as well as a most precious indication of the impact of the exhibition form on the fascist historic imaginary. Writing an editorial for his journal Casabella from the Greek front in 1941, Pagano maintained that the very temporariness of the exhibition form had embodied the futurist vision of the modern artist.74 Making clear that this vision was not identified with futurist art or exhibitions, Pagano specified that the impact of the exhibition form in fascist culture resided in its having marginalized art exhibitions through the development of exhibition art. For Pagano, 1930s exhibition art had accomplished ‘a futurist synthesis of novecentismo [sic] and razionalismo’ that had transfigured the operation of the fascist corporate state, by staking the commercial success of an exhibition on a competent administrative structure, and on ‘the artistic direction of an artist, whose volition and temperament are strong enough to gain the tactical command

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of the battle and project the extensive and total authority of a film director or referee.’ ‘The poetic sense and imagination of architect-painters,’ he concluded, ‘has contributed to the exaltation of “pure” values that ignore practical considerations in order to attempt an affirmation of style in the most lyrical sense of the word.’75 Possibly the most militant enemy and influential critic of stile littorio, Pagano rightly emphasized in this war-time editorial the foundational role of razionalismo in the evolution of fascist exhibition culture. His principal thesis found both textual and visual confirmation in the articles and photographic documentation which followed his editorial in this special number dedicated by Casabella to the historical evolution of exhibition art in Italy and abroad, from the nineteenth century to the present (1941). The very attention devoted by Casabella to exhibition art in wartime conclusively shows that, if the nazification of fascist ideology and politics had brought to completion the alliance between the fascist ‘Patron State’ and the stile littorio cultural front, the connections between the fascist historic imaginary, the exhibition form, and modernist culture had never been severed. Aesthetic avant-gardism might have lost its war against stile littorio on the very battlefield of the mass exhibition but this did not diminish the modernist tenor of fascist mass culture in the mid- to late 1930s. On the contrary, Pagano’s editorial and Casabella’s photographic documentation showed that the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary in exhibition art had been achieved in the second half of the 1930s thanks to the intervention of a new actor: Italian industry. ‘More than in political exhibitions,’ Pagano pointed out, it is in ‘advertisement architecture that fascist artists have produced the most lyric results.’76 And, for Pagano, the cumulative effect of Italian avantgarde artists’ involvement in advertisement and exhibition-art was the gradual erosion of the lines of distinction they had drawn among themselves and those that, in the public eye, had polarized avant-garde art and popular culture in the 1920s. As the essays and photographs published by Casabella documented, the development of fascist exhibition art was principally dependent on the alliance between state-sponsored image politics and commercial advertisement.77 In the first place, the collaboration between modernist artists and the regime inaugurated with the MRF was cemented on a smaller but regular scale in a number of state-sponsored exhibitions, ranging from the famous Milanese Triennali (1933, 1936, 1940), to the two national exhibitions of Plastica murale (1934 and 1936), to the 1936 National Exhibition of Commercial

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Posters and Graphic Arts, to the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris.78 Secondly, after 1935, the ideological climate of autarchy favoured the multiplication of local and national fairs showcasing not only Italian products and productivity but also the successful ideological marriage of fascist claims to absolute distinction, modernist art, and Italian business. In this field, Sironi’s lasting association with FIAT advertising and fair pavilions (1934–1940), Nizzoli’s connection with Campari, and Marinetti’s poems celebrating all-Italian textiles (ryon) constituted the tip of a fascist-modernist iceberg that has only recently began to receive some attention.79 Seen in this larger context, the connections Pagano posited between the temporariness of the exhibition form and the tactical command, futurist vision, and exaltation of pure values required of any exhibition’s art director fit the characteristics of his fascist-modernist masterpiece (the Aeronautics Exhibition) just as much as those of the autonomous cities of the Circo Massimo exhibitions.80 In this crucial respect, Pagano’s reflections on fascist exhibition art correctly acknowledged the exhibition form as a future-oriented affirmation of style, that was parallel, rather than antithetical, to stile littorio. Clearly ‘style,’ in the ‘most lyrical sense of the word,’ still referred in 1941 in Pagano’s view to no aesthetic style in particular but to that normative conception of style that had always sustained the fascist historic imaginary and had been epitomized in the MRF. By the same token, Pagano’s insistence on the ‘futurist synthesis of novecento and razionalismo’ incorporated by fascist exhibition art highlighted its origins in the imago-model of the MRF, rather than its derivation from futurist art. In fact, Pagano’s definition of the futurist vision of the fascist mass exhibition resonated most uncannily with the last, most literal, and purely stile littorio incarnation of the MRF’s imago: the 1942 Universal Exhibition of Rome (EUR 42) that was to celebrate the second decade of the fascist era.81 Conceived by Mussolini himself during the Ethiopian campaign (June 1935), the idea of a temporary Universal Exhibition, which would be hosted in Rome in the year XX of the fascist era (1941–42) and then transformed into a permanent city, constituted immediately the central and definitive battlefield for the culture wars between stile littorio and fascist modernism.82 In the well-documented history of the gradual exclusion of rationalist architects from the planning, organizing committee, major commissions, and partial realizations of EUR 42 we may read the chronicle of the fateful debacle of aesthetic avant-gardism in post-1935 fascist Italy.83 In its permanent architectural remnants spread through-

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out today’s ‘quartiere EUR’ in Rome, we may capture the gap between the idea of an exhibition city and its modern ghost town realization.84 This gap, however, should not lead us to obliterate from our view the visionary ‘city of exhibitions’ that, from 1935 through to the last day of its incomplete realization, was projected to be the mature expression of fascist normative style tout court.85 This visionary investment made of EUR 42 the ideological point of condensation for a new fascist Gesamtkunstwerk aimed at celebrating simultaneously the regimentation of pasttime and the reorientation of the fascist historic imaginary toward history belonging to the future. No fascist exhibition ever epitomized all the characteristics attributed by Pagano to fascist exhibition art better than EUR 42. None, that is, staked its success on the collaboration of industrial advertising, a competent administrative structure, and the total authority of an artistic director (Marcello Piacentini) more than EUR 42. And, none could even come close to ‘the exaltation of “pure” values that ignore practical considerations in order to attempt an affirmation of style in the most lyrical sense of the word’ pursued by EUR 42. Since its inception and all through its partial realization, which lasted well into the war years (until March 1943), EUR 42 was conceived as an ‘Olympics of Civilizations’ in which the Italian fascist claim to distinction was to be realized ‘with sprezzatura,’ that is, by ‘winning without saying it and without appearing to do so.’86 In the realization of EUR 42 thus converged all the frustrations for the loss of distinction suffered by the fascist historic imaginary as a result of the relentless subordination of both Mussolini and fascism to the Nazi ally, as well as all the hopes to regain it.87 At the same time, to win ‘with and in style’ meant for the organizers of the Roman Olympics of Civilizations not only matching on the terrain of culture the German Olympic games of 1937, but also overcoming all recent universal exhibitions by unifying past (Chicago 1933: ‘a century of progress’), present (Paris 1937: ‘modern arts and technology’), and future (New York: ‘to build the world of tomorrow’) in the simultaneous realization of a ‘city of fascist style’ and a ‘fascist-style city.’ Temporariness (modernity) and permanence (Romanness) were to be joined in an affirmation of the ‘preponderance of the values of representation and image over those of economy and materiality.’88 Every exhibition in each exhibition city was to represent yesterday, today, and tomorrow; a future city was to be born from the merging of a ‘mute architecture’ of repetitive arches and columns (past-time) and an ‘exhibition art’ of light, colours, and modernist forms (present-time). EUR 42 was to be the apotheosis of the fascist

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historic imaginary. Had it been brought to completion as planned, the fascist historic imaginary might have remained under everyone’s eye – as might also its ties to the formation of post-historic(al) forms of imaginary that characterize our own age.

EPILOGUE

I have been meaning to propose to you to write together a Universal History. George Bataille, 14 April 19341

The right has taken advantage of the Communist experience to appropriate some of the methods of their adversaries. We are convinced that the reverse is necessary today. We must turn the fascist means of propaganda and their tactics to the profit of the workers. Georges Bataille, 5 March 19362

I return to Georges Bataille in this epilogue in order to recombine my microhistorical exploration of fascist historic culture with the intellectual and theoretical stakes of this study alluded to in the introduction and first chapter. The first quote is from the back of the letter – cited in the introduction – in which Bataille reported to his comrade-friend Raymond Queneau the strong impression he had received from his visit to the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in April 1934. The second quote is from a note written by Bataille to Pierre Kaan two years later, a few weeks before the folding of their antifascist review Contre-Attaque. Bataille would never even begin the project of a universal history – with or without Queneau – but we may safely infer that this project was Bataille’s first, instinctive reaction to the astonishing historia rerum gestarum he had witnessed in the fascist exhibition. Instead, the longerterm impact of the MRF on Bataille might have had a lot to do with his more strategic desire to appropriate a fascist means of propaganda for an antifascist project. In particular, this desire may have found expression in the surrealist image that Bataille chose for the secret antifascist

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Figure 30. André Masson, Acéphale, 1936.

society and journal, Acéphale, which he founded in late 1936 after the demise of Contre-Attaque.3 The image of the Acéphale was that of a decapitated man, a dagger in his left hand, a heart of fire in his right, a labyrinthine stomach in relief, and a skull covering the sexual organs (Figure 30). As such, the Acéphale was a sort of reversed Leviathan: it symbolized a society

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founded on regicide – a society, that is, in which the sacred bond among its people was born of the destruction of the head of state, be it king or Duce. For Bataille, in fact, the main intellectual goal of the sect was to rescue ‘the sacred’ from fascist appropriation; its political scope was to turn antifascism toward an antireligious project.4 But in what sense did the image of the Acéphale appropriate fascist means of propaganda and tactics for an antifascist project? Surely, not in any aesthetic sense: André Masson’s drawings for the journal did not even attempt to match the avant-garde aesthetics of fascist exhibitions such as the MRF, and, contrary to the latter’s mass appeal, Acéphale, the journal, had a small circulation. Yet its icon appropriated and reversed the very imagery – skulls and daggers – that had so much impressed Bataille in his 1934 visit to the MRF. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a more poignant icon of a counter-fascist historic imaginary than Masson’s Acéphale. On the one hand, this image celebrated the decapitation of Louis XVI as the historic event that founded the political figure of the sovereign people, thereby pointing toward a still submerged historic imaginary in which the modern ‘people’ (the workers) would finally assume the role of historic agent. On the other hand, by gesturing toward the original historic event – the French Revolution – Acéphale suggested that the visionary core of historicness could still be rescued from both a liberal (Kantian-transcendental) and a fascist (actualist-immanent) politics of history. In noting the lingering effect that the MRF’s excessive historic figuration had on Bataille, my intent is to highlight the crucial role that the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary may have played in generating not only political responses to, but also intellectual insights into, the contribution of the Italian fascist phenomenon to the general evolution of mass culture in the twentieth century. As anticipated in the introduction, both the research agenda and the methodology of this study have been informed by such insights, and by the critical choices of intellectuals such as Bataille to observe fascist strategies at close range and even appropriate them for an antifascist intellectual front. In keeping with this approach, I wish to appropriate Bataille’s antifascist image itself to use it as a hypericon of my argument as well as a means to probe deeper into its theoretical stakes. Acéphale points decisively to the ideological centrality that the historic vision of agency, representation, and imagination assumed for Italian fascism. At the same time, its figurative decapitation of Mussolini from the imaginary body of fascism highlights the progressive process of abstraction that characterized the evolution

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of fascist historic culture. But what about Bataille’s act of counter-historic transfiguration itself? Doesn’t this image-act also suggest that the formation of a historic imaginary might not have been a phenomenon limited to Italian fascism? Acéphale throws in sharp relief the most important findings of this research, while at the same time issuing an invitation to go beyond its temporal and geographical boundaries. The Fascist Historic Imaginary as a Visionary Politics of History My principal contention throughout this book has been that fascism was characterized by a politics of history that cannot be identified with the fascistization of the historical past that ideologues and professional historians pursued with greater or lesser zeal during the regime. Surely the unending production of fascist precursors and the mythic identification of fascism with the Roman imperial past constituted a genuinely fascist ‘historical’ culture, which contributed in no small measure to the legitimization of the regime and the politics of consensus identifiable with the cult of fascism. Yet this historical culture had very little to do with the Mussolinian core of the fascist imaginary or the politics of enthusiasm associated with the myth and cult of the Duce. Fascist ducismo instead institutionalized itself in a visionary politics of history that transfigured the popular culture notion of historic eventfulness into the idea of historic agency. Protecting itself from within its imaginary core, fascism presented itself as an agent whose acts possessed the quality of transtemporal immediacy and the faculty of unmediated signification we commonly attribute to historic events, speeches, and sites. Just like a historic event, every fascist act was meant to eliminate the medium of representation between historical agency and consciousness. Modelled after the Mussolinian historic speech, fascist historic representations sought to make the past suddenly present and signified in the mind of the observer. In the fashion of a historic site, the fascist historic imaginary always tended toward a spatial annulment of time. Ideologically, the fascist transfiguration of historic eventfulness into agency was best captured in the Mussolinian motto ‘fascism makes history; it does not write it.’ Philosophically, however, the polarization between liberal history writing and fascist history making was anticipated and sustained by Giovanni Gentile’s actualist philosophy of history. Specifically, the idea of fascist history making referred to Gentile’s concept of ‘history belonging to the present,’ with which Gentile had given a full-blown philosophical translation to the notion of historic eventful-

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ness. Merging the philosophical dogma of absolute immanence with the Latin Catholic notion of representation as effect of presence (imago), actualism advocated the reciprocal immanence of the historical and the historiographical act. In Gentile’s own words, ‘history is all present and immanent in the act of its construction.’5 That is, just as every historical act in the present is also historiographical, because it gives sudden presence to a certain past in the mind of its actor, so every historiographical act is historical in so far as it makes the past suddenly present in the mind of its viewer. In the final analysis, history did not exist for Gentile beyond the act that constituted it simultaneously as a reality of the mind and a representation of this reality. Endorsing the immanent principles of the actualist philosophy of history, fascism not only rejected the transcendental conception of history en-dorsed by liberal and Marxist philosophies of history but issued a direct intellectual challenge to the notion of historical consciousness they both assumed legitimized their notions of historical agency and representation. For Marxist materialism, just as for liberal historicism, positivism, and idealism, the modern subject of history was a historical agent in so far as he or she was endowed with a historical consciousness that translated the narrative objects of historical representation into transcendental metanarratives of emancipation (freedom, progress, communism, etc.). Fascism instead conceived the subject as endowed with a historic imaginary that collapsed agency and representation along the lines of what I have called the actualist catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal. This way, fascism replaced both the diachronic direction of historical consciousness (past to present) and its image in historical representation (narrative) with the idea that only by making the past ‘present’ one could properly make history. It was, in fact, this corollary injunction to give the past visual presence (enargèia) that characterized the fascist visionary politics of history and that distinguished it sharply from the transcendental utopias projected by Nazism and Bolshevism. In the beginning the fascist historic imaginary coalesced around the celebration of the March on Rome as the historical sign that confirmed the momentous reorientation of the historical imagination toward ‘history belonging to the present,’ as posited by Gentile in 1918. The March on Rome was ritualized as the historic event that ushered in not only a new epoch, but also an epoch-making subject, a historic agent. This agent, of course, immediately assumed the imaginary semblance of Mussolini the history-maker, and the image of fascist historic agency found in Mussolini’s historic speeches its first rhetorical incarnation. The his-

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toric encoding of Mussolini’s word was just as much an affair orchestrated from above as it was dependent on the willing participation of fascism’s mass audience. In fact, the reciprocity of this process was no better instanced than in the never-ending transformation of Mussolini’s historic speeches into mottoes. At the same time, it was in the visual representation of recent national history that the connection between the popular and spontaneous construction of an imaginary Mussolini and the formation of a properly fascist historic imaginary found the most appropriate means of expression in the mid- to late 1920s. Whether in archives, museums, and exhibitions, or in historical monuments and commemorations, the fascist politics of history did not settle for mere lieux de mémoire. They sought to create historic production sites for the transformation of the idea of a fascist historic agency into a historic mode of representation, and for its institutionalization at all levels of fascist mass culture. As we have seen, this cultural project involved a large number of agents: Mussolini, of course, but also museum curators, modernist critics, journalists, and avant-garde artists who fought against all forms of historical culture seeking to make the identification of fascism and historicness a phenomenological reality for the Italian masses. In turn, the visualization of the fascist historic agency kept reinforcing the consolidation of the collective historic imaginary it presupposed. Throughout the 1920s the consolidation of a fascist mode of historic representation functioned as a key nexus between fascist modernism and the popular cult of the Duce. In fact, at a more general level of interpretation, it is precisely in this first phase in the institutionalization of the fascist historic imaginary that we may locate the crucial point of ideological condensation between the fascist sacralization and aestheticization of politics. The unique amalgamation of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes, modernist thought, and avant-garde aesthetic principles was as necessary a condition for the elaboration of a historic mode of representation, as for the formation of a properly fascist historic imaginary. Without the longevity and widespread literacy of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes, Mussolini’s invocation of fascist history making would have remained within the realm of the fascist rhetorics of virility and never transformed into the popular motto that sustained the mental image of a fascist historic agency. Without the translation of modernist intellectuals and avant-garde artists, Gentile’s actualist philosophy of history would have remained unrecognized, rather than providing the intellectual tightrope that sustained the formation of the fascist historic imaginary in 1920s Italy. To summarize with reference to the primary fascist

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icon – the fasces bundled around an axe – in the consolidation of the historic imaginary we recognize the string that kept the Mussolinian axe tied to the bundling activity of the fascist party. This process, however, was neither linear nor devoid of irony. Both aesthetically and ideologically the formation phase of the fascist historic imaginary climaxed in the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. First – in its conceptualization – this mostra-dimostrazione gave synaesthetic expression to the normative conception of style that had sustained the elaboration of a fascist mode of historic representation since the beginning. Second – in its peripheral itinerary – it put on stage a historic representation of the fascist historic imaginary itself. Finally – in its central historic halls – the MRF projected itself as a historic event in its own right aimed at superseding the very historic event and imaginary it celebrated. Thus, in contrast with its celebrated aesthetic unity, the excessive historic figuration of the MRF epitomized the very principle of transfiguration that had characterized the consolidation of fascist historic culture throughout the 1920s. Historically born from the ashes of the Great War, ideologically tied to the popular cult of Mussolini, and intellectually sustained by the actualist philosophy of history, the fascist historic imaginary had not remained faithful to any of its original traits. First, the Great War was replaced by the March on Rome, and the warrelated historic icon of the Duce Taumaturgo by that of the historic Duce (1922–32). Then, the historic Duce himself was transfigured into his allegorical mouthpiece, Il Popolo d’Italia (1932). Finally, with the transfiguration of the Duce-People of Italy into the stylized unit of historic time projected toward the future – the decade – the fascist historic imaginary lost even its connection to history belonging to the present. As Bataille’s uncanny image suggests, the institutionalization of fascist historic culture in the second decade of the regime corresponded to a veritable decapitation of Mussolini’s head from the collective body of the fascist historic imaginary. Conversely, this decapitation definitively severed fascist historic culture from the immanent conception of history that had characterized its consolidation in the 1920s. While winning its war against the historical, the fascist historic imaginary itself split right down the middle in the 1930s: on one side, the stylized time of the historic decade and the future orientation of the exhibition form; on the other, the museification of all past and present time – including the fascist revolution itself. In the aesthetic sphere this polarization was reflected in the culture wars that opposed stile littorio to fascist modernism. Intellectually, however, it corresponded also to the waning of Gen-

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tile’s philosophical and political star. With the fraying of the actualist tightrope that had sustained its formation, the fascist historic imaginary itself began alternating between the regimentation of the present in the form of the past and the projection of history into the future. Contrary to Gentile’s prediction, therefore, the fascist mind had reoriented itself from history belonging to the past to history belonging to the present only to find itself oscillating between present belonging to the past and history belonging to the future. Yet it is precisely in this return of the repressed – this oscillation – in a new form that we may find the most compelling reason to deepen our reflections on the historical status of Gentile’s philosophical intuitions and explore the history of historic semantics before and beyond Italian fascism. Historic(al) Culture Turning back to our hypericon one cannot but be startled by the uncanny resonance of the Acèphale with the final images that consigned Mussolini to history. In 1945 Mussolini’s dead body was exposed to the gaze of the Milanese people in Piazzale Loreto, first with a mock sceptre in his right arm and then hanging from an electric pole head down. My intention here is not to celebrate the suggestive power of antifascist imagery, but to recognize that the many levels of intellectual confrontation and iconic collusion between fascist and antifascist imaginaries may suggest more than a family resemblance. Going back to the original historic event – the French Revolution – Bataille’s image desecrated its Kantian standing as the historical sign of transcendental history, proposing instead the vengeful mob that decapitated Louis XVI as the founding figure of a history-making agent. In this sense, Acèphale is more than a counter-historic image. It yields the challenging proposition that the actualist philosophy of history may have indeed recognized something that had escaped all of its speculative predecessors (Marx, Hegel, Kant): that since the dawn of modern historical culture the formation of a historical imaginary based on the notion of transcendental history (belonging to the past) was always counteracted by a popular cultural imaginary rooted in the immanent notion of historic eventfulness (belonging to the present). As Reinhard Koselleck has repeatedly pointed out, the latter quarter of the eighteenth century marked the momentous invention of ‘modern historical semantics,’ a process he rightly identified with the ‘transcendentalization,’ ‘temporization,’ and ‘singularization’ of history

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pursued by both nineteenth-century historiography and philosophies of history.6 From the 1770s onward the terminological displacement of historie by Geschichte(n) in the German language marked, according to Koselleck, the general and definitive replacement of a long-standing Latin Christian conception of historia magistra vitae (history as life’s teacher) by the singular notion of history as a ‘universal relation of events,’ a new ‘articulation of past and future,’ and a transcendental whole ‘always more than any account made of it.’ The capitalization of ‘History’ in German philosophical circles ‘reinterpreted the criterion of epic representation and transformed it into a category of the Historical,’ setting in motion a semantic revolution that led to the emergence of all transcendental singulars such as Freedom, Progress, Justice, and Revolution in modern Western culture. And, on the representational front, the temporization of Geschichte expressed itself in the syntactical limitation of historical narration to the past tense.7 Koselleck’s reconstruction of the mainstream development of modern historical culture has found no dissenting voices, but the assertion that this late eighteenth-century revolution definitively replaced the Latin Christian conception of history does not do justice to Koselleck’s own account of its centuries-long persistence and elasticity.8 Assuming that the rhetorical topos of historia magistra vitae ‘dissolved itself within a modernized historical process,’ Koselleck does not explore or recognize its permutations in the evolution of modern historical culture.9 As argued in Chapter 1, the discursive appearance of the notions of historic event, speech, and site at the dawn of the modern age constituted precisely the key permutation of historia magistra vitae. United by a common reference to the mental perception of unmediated ‘presence’ in representation, these three notions offered a historic semantics, which captured the rhetorical core of the ancient-epic conception of history that for centuries had dominated Latin Catholic culture. Whether translated into a specific terminology or not, historic semantics opposed the syntactical identification of Geschichte with the narrative past (tense) by offering a discursive translation of the grammatical notion of historic present and thereby countering all three fields of semantic modernization indicated by Koselleck. They pointed toward the immanent experience of presence rather than narrative transcendence, epochal rather than temporal signification, and significance rather than singularity. Seen from this perspective, the semantic differentiation between the adjectives ‘historic’ – important in the eyes of history itself – and ‘historical’ – belonging to the past – introduced by late eighteenth-century his-

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torians appears much less as an original invention than as the warding off of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes permeating popular culture by the modern guardians of bourgeois high culture. In fact, we need look no further than the first conceptualization of historicness in Kant’s Contest of the Faculties to verify the militant transfiguration of the former by the latter. Far from dissolving the ancient conception of history into the modern one, Kant’s concept of historical sign extracted the epic from historia and transposed it onto the transcendental Geschichte. With this philosophical operation Kant set the discursive evolution of both modern historiography and speculative philosophy of history on a transcendental narrative path throughout the nineteenth century. Yet – although only further research on the sites of historic institutionalization in nineteenthcentury historical culture can give us a sense of its scope – there is at least one compelling reason to suspect that the development of modern historical semantics did not prevent the parallel evolution of a popular historic imaginary. This reason, of course, is actualism, but not merely for its philosophical translation of historic semantics analysed in Chapter 1,10 but also for its historical resonance with the peculiar culture of history that informed it. It was in fact in post-Risorgimento Italy – that is, long before Gentile and fascism gave it philosophical and political expression – that we find the clear signs of a historic(al) culture fractured along the lines of a historic imaginary resisting all metanarrative inoculations. Historians have long documented that, during Italy’s liberal era (1870–1914) the memorialization and historicization of the founding event of the Italian nation, the Risorgimento, came to constitute one of the most unsuccessful chapters in the nationalization of the Italian masses.11 The politics of history that developed in united Italy around the Risorgimento between the 1870s and 1914 were highly contentious and fragmented. Several important factors have been identified as preventing an effective nationalization of the Risorgimento: reasons of political in- convenience (the enduring conflict between the Italian state and the papacy after 1870); fragmented local popular initiatives in conflict with national-cultural commemorative inertia; and, naturally, the polarized political appeal of founding figures such as Mazzini and Garibaldi for republican sympathizers, and of King Victor Emmanuel II and Count Cavour for supporters of the monarchy.12 To these political shortcomings, some scholars have recently added the cultural gap between the positivist distaste of most Italian historians for recent national history and the hagiographic paradigms by which means the public historicization of the Risorgimento was slowly activated between

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the mid-1880s and the first decade of the new century.13 Most scholars, however, have limited their attention to evaluating the relative impact and responsibilities of cultural and political elites but paid little attention to the inherent ambivalence of this project.14 I am referring, of course, to the widely expressed truism that the label ‘Risorgimento’ (resurgence) – born ex post facto in popular literature, but rejected for a long time by liberal historians in its capitalized form – encoded this founding event not just as a metaphor, value, or rhetorical figure, but also as a proper imago of resurrection that not only resisted and overshadowed any conventional historical narrativization but also affected any such attempt.15 Even when an official conciliatory image of the Risorgimental process as the result of ‘different intentions collaborating toward the same goal’ found its way into synthetic histories, commemorations, textbooks, and museums, it was popularly expressed in a Latin rhetorical formula (concordia discords) that lacked any metanarrative appeal. The deficit of nationalization registered by most studies at the level of popular historical consciousness cannot be ascribed exclusively to the delay with which the liberal elites faced the question of producing and popularizing a national vision of the Risorgimento, or the hindrance offered by local and political allegiances. A more subtle and active resistance was offered at the levels of both agency and reception by the endurance of Latin Catholic rhetorical codes in structuring the Italian collective imaginary. This resistance, in fact, was at no time more visible than during the Great War, when both political and cultural elites worked hardest to unify an all-too-divided memory of the Risorgimento. The coalescence of a popular and unifying historical myth of the Risorgimento took place in the months preceding the Italian entrance into the Great War. It was nourished throughout the conflict by the speeches of politicians and the writings of intellectuals, and it found its way into the letters and diaries of officers as well as those of simple soldiers.16 Naturally, some scholars have justly emphasized the extent to which the hagiographic and politicized nature of pre-war Risorgimental historiography affected the formation of a plurality of Risorgimental myths during the war, with the epic hero Garibaldi and the apostle Mazzini towering over all other inspirational figures. Others have duly deflated the mass diffusion and effectiveness of Risorgimento propaganda in wartime. In general, however, the Great War has been recognized as the birthplace of a nationalizing myth of the Risorgimento that, in the context of mass conscription and nationalist fervour, contributed

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in no small measure to its historicization via the double image of the Great War as a fourth war of independence and as a fulfilment of the Risorgimento.17 Once again, though, no attention has been paid to the rhetorical tension between the narrative encoding of the first image (the fourth war of independence) and the historic imago of the Great War as fulfilment of the Risorgimento. While often used interchangeably and at all levels of propaganda, the diffusion of these two sister images reveals the contemporaneous coalescence of, and mental oscillation between, historical and historic imaginaries in the Italian experience of the Great War. The former reinforced the narrativization of the Great War event in an open military sequence; the latter refigured the Risorgimento as an advent to a new resurrection, the Great War. We cannot but recognize at this point that, as formulated at war’s end in ‘Politica e filosofia,’ Gentile’s philosophy of history may have been not only psychologically realistic – as shown in Chapter 1 – but also historically resonant. Gentile’s first proposition, that the modern subject had always oscillated between the transcendental pole of ‘history belonging to the past’ and the immanent one of ‘history belonging to the present,’ rendered historical justice to the longevity and elasticity of Latin Catholic rhetorics in the evolution of Italian historic(al) culture during the liberal era. In other words, Gentile’s claim was sustained by the historical fact that, in Italy, a popular historic imaginary had indeed formed over time, and ever more rapidly during the war, around the image of the Risorgimento. One may thus conclude that, historically, the actualist philosophy of history itself was the expression of a diffused historic imaginary that sought to exorcise the war-trauma with an imago of Risorgimento-Advent. At the same time, however, Gentile also affirmed that the Great War had put an end to the oscillation he theorized and had reoriented the modern subject away from ‘history belonging to the past’ toward ‘history belonging to the present.’ And, on this score, Gentile saw in Italian fascism the sole intellectual-political subject that had oriented itself toward ‘history belonging to the present.’ Fascism presented itself as embodying this reorientation and gave it fullblown cultural expression in its self-presentation as historic agent, in the ritual stimulation of a collective historic imaginary, in its translation into a historic mode of representation, and in the institutionalization of the latter into a proper historic culture. Yet the very history of fascist historic culture returns us to our point of departure to wonder about Gentile’s first proposition concerning the mental oscillation of the modern subject between historical and historic imaginaries.

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Contrary to Gentile’s prediction, the fascist orientation toward history belonging to the present in the 1920s was the prelude to another form of oscillation in the second decade of the regime. While replacing the contest between historical and historic modes of representation that had characterized the previous decade, the fascist historic imaginary itself split in the 1930s, around a new divide: on the one hand the regimentation, serialization, and museification of both past and present; on the other, the visionary goal to give presence to the future rather than the past. Just as the MRF had sought to resolve the 1920s contest between history belonging to the past and history belonging to the present, so we find a monumental effort to eliminate the new oscillation at the end of the second decade of the fascist era. The visionary project for an Olympics of Civilization to be celebrated into 1942 (EUR ’42) was a desperate attempt to synthesize the seriality of the historical and the futurization of the historic. Left uncompleted in its stile littorio shell, the remnants of the EUR 42 have been integrated into the urban space of a post-fascist Rome, making it very hard to recapture the oscillation it was designed to conquer. However, below this mummified surface lies perhaps the most visionary core of the fascist politics of history as a whole. Compared to its celebrated predecessor, the MRF, the EUR 42 sought to situate fascist historic culture in a much larger context. Exorcizing the imminent death of the fascist fatherland with a desperate affirmation of normative style, the EUR 42 issued the first all-encompassing image of the ‘end of history.’ At the same time, long deprived of its actualist tightrope, fascism also serialized with the EUR 42 its own unit of historic time, the decade. Thus, the history of fascist historic culture leaves us in 1942 with an exorcism that, quite unlike the one proposed by its philosophical prophet in 1918, did not announce any dramatic reorientation. The EUR 42 celebrated a historic imaginary that, to put it in its original syntactical terms, eliminated both the transcendental and immanent poles of modern historic(al) culture by shifting its predicative form from historic present to historic infinitive. Fortunately, fascism had no opportunity to express this shift in a new wave of a visionary politics of history. Yet, considering this final act of historic transfiguration in the light of the imaginary forms of temporality that have developed in our so-called postmodern era, one cannot avoid pushing one’s reflections beyond the geographical and temporal boundaries of Italian historic(al) culture and the history of the fascist historic imaginary. Just like the image of Mussolini’s hanging body, the skeleton of the never-

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realized EUR 42 leaves us wondering about the afterlife that fascist historic culture may have found in the formation of a posthistoric(al) form of imaginary and culture. Posthistoric(al) Culture Notwithstanding repeated declarations of death for all traditional forms of historical culture, and related calls by prominent philosophers and intellectuals to endorse a ‘postmodern’ attitude toward time and life, faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment and historical progress has survived the catastrophe of World War II and is still shared by millions of people – not only in the West. Yet it is also undeniable that, over the past six decades, this faith has had to compete with an adversary much more corrosive and insidious than any philosophical proposition. What began in the mid-nineteenth century as a means through which the Russian intelligentsia referred to successive generations of intellectuals, the decade has become in the postwar era the principal unit by which most people in the West count, segment, and account for the passing of time. ‘The ’50s,’ ‘the ’60s,’ etc., are no longer labels referring to generations of writers, but to successive and self-contained eras whose distinguishing referent is always a style (of clothing, haircut, car, or behaviour), but whose common signified is never progress, or historical evolution, but always mere seriality. Fashions simply follow rather than evolve from each other, and they also always return. Could it not be the case that the stylization of time in the ‘historic decade’ operated by fascism in the 1930s may have constituted the key step in the transfiguration of the Russian ‘generation-decade’ into the ‘fashion-decade’ that characterizes what we may properly term the posthistorical imaginary of our age? This question is blatantly rhetorical and provocative. Its verification and transformation into a specific research agenda lies well beyond the scope of this book. However, its explicit suggestion that, in the evolution of fascist historic culture, we may also recognize a cultural laboratory for the formation of a posthistorical form of imaginary merits some final remarks in view of the direct support it finds in recent studies that have explored significant areas of continuities, mutual appropriations, and imaginary transfigurations between fascist visual culture and postindustrial mass culture. Film studies, of course, have been on the forefront of this research, revealing, for example, the enduring contest between fascist and bourgeois rhetorics of virility in the re-coding of the image of

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the femme fatale, from silent film, thorough fascist movies, to postwar feminizations of fascism.18 Similarly, the analysis of fascist advertising and industries has highlighted specific continuities between corporatefascist and corporate-capitalist image politics in the postwar era.19 In general, all studies of fascist visual culture have highlighted the continuities, connections, mutual influences, and responses between the Italian-fascist imaginary and the evolution of capitalist-consumer mass culture at large – before, during, and after the fall of fascism. Seen in this context, and considering that the practice of segmenting time into decades has become a mass phenomenon only in the postwar era, the imaginary transfiguration of the fascist unit of historic time into serialized retro-time may appear not only possible but even probable. In fact, to confirm the plausibility of a very direct connection between the evolution of the fascist historic imaginary and the diffusion of a postmodernist sensitivity dominated by the temporality of fashion we do not need to resort to far-fetched alliterations or Susan Sontag’s warnings about ‘fascinating Fascism.’20 This connection and collusion is inscribed in the unique place that Italy – that is, ‘made in Italy’ – has assumed in the postindustrial imaginary on a global scale. Whether embodied in design or material products, the idea of Italian style has come to function as antidote and parasitical other to the idea of fashion itself. The bearer of Italian fashion is not simply in style ; he or she projects the image of having style, in the normative sense of being recognized as absolutely ‘distinct’ in the mass of seemingly undistinguishable consumers. Lest we want to give in to the dangerously essentialist notion that Italians have style in their blood, we cannot but recognize that this cultural construct is the last offspring of a normative-style imaginary that might be the most enduring legacy of fascist modernism. Unencumbered by either totalitarian or modernist utopias, the normative conception of style that sustained a fascist politics of distinction in 1920s and 1930s Italy has found fulfilment in the postwar construction of Italian style as the sign of style tout court. Isn’t it quite plausible, then, to identify in this iconization of Italy as style the symptom of a posthistorical imaginary that has responded to the fascist stylization of time with the transfiguration of the decade into serialized mode retro-time? Far from offering empirical confirmation of this hypothesis there is corroborating evidence to its plausibility in the symptoms that characterize the formation of a posthistoric form of imaginary as well. It is hardly disputable that one of the principal traits that distinguishes the different postwar generations and separates them from previous ones is

Epilogue

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their explicit acknowledgment of the role played by historic events in the formation of their imaginaries. The Holocaust, the revolts of 1968, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, to cite just the key events that have marked three successive generations of postwar Europeans, have all been explicitly perceived, described and treated as ‘historic’ – on different imaginary levels of course. At the same time, none of them has been transfigured into the birth of a historic agent as was the March on Rome by Italian fascists. On the contrary, the formation of generational imaginaries after World War II has been haunted by the recurrent and obsessive image of ‘the end’ of history – with all of its cinematic promise of infinite new beginnings. First articulated by Alexander Kojève in lectures given in Paris in the late 1930s, but published only after the end of the war, in 1947, this quintessential Hegelian trope has realized itself as a series of icons that have percolated through all levels of mass culture.21 From Adorno’s famous equation of Auschwitz with ‘the end of poetry,’ to more recent ones associating the Holocaust with ‘the end of the Enlightenment’ and ‘the end of modernity,’ to the popular association of 1968 with ‘the end of ideologies,’ to the identification of the fall of the Berlin Wall with ‘the end of communism,’ the postmodern (Western) imaginary has been consumed by historic semantics. To survive, then, beyond the end of the Enlightenment, modernity, ideologies, and history, seems to be the categorical imperative of successive but repetitive forms of posthistoric imaginaries. Still the relationship between the formation of a historic culture during fascism and that of posthistoric imaginaries may appear at first sight as one of mere analogy and philosophical affinity. Just like the former in Gentile’s philosophy of history, the latter has found philosophical articulation in a new revision of Hegelian philosophy of history conducted by Alexander Kojève. Yet, whether or not Kojève ever read Gentile’s work, his idea of a ‘new animality’ connected to the transformation of history into ‘environment’ continued the detranscendentalization and detemporization of historical semantics initiated by his predecessor.22 In the repetitive return of posthistoric semantics to the mental image of the end of history, we thus recognize a more historical connection between the rise of posthistoric imaginaries and the evolution of fascist historic culture as a whole. The idea of the end of history does not refer so much to the fateful decline of historical semantics. Instead it captures the historical demise of the fascist idea of historic agency in fascist historic culture itself. Posthistoric imaginaries institutionalize the historic infinitive projected by Italian fascism in the 1930s. In the final analysis,

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the postmodern condition, famously defined by Jean-François Lyotard as a widespread ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ might be more accurately and fruitfully thought of as a posthistoric(al) condition marked by imaginaries that prevent the experience of both historical transcendence and historic immanence.23 These, then, are the wider conclusions to which this study may lead, if, of course, its final suggestions were to find further support and confirmation on both empirical and theoretical grounds. What seems beyond dispute is the political opportunity and scholarly necessity of keeping alive the recent research focus on the mental and cultural continuities between fascist and postfascist forms of imaginaries. Surely, the so-called normalization of fascism ritually condemned by well-meaning intellectuals at every turn of the revisionist clock has assumed political dimensions that demand careful critique and political vigilance. Yet, as this book demonstrates, the close reading of fascist culture is neither doomed to ‘credulously report what fascism said rather than critically exploring what it meant’ nor fated to contribute to its political rehabilitation – as a recent critic of the so-called culturalist approach to the study of fascism, R.J.B. Bosworth, has improperly charged.24 To close one’s eyes to the fact that fascist mass culture may have also constituted a laboratory for the development of traits, trends, and paths developed later and on a larger scale in our posthistoric(al) age is to remain condemned to a very conservative form of antifascism which still refuses to acknowledge and take on the many intellectual challenges that Italian fascism issued, and that some of its most acute observers and adversaries – such as Bataille – recognized and left us to unravel.

NOTES

Introduction 1 ‘Mon cher Raymond, je t’écris de l’exposition fasciste même parce qu’il y a des tables commodes pour écrire et voici comment l’idée m’est venue de t’écrire. Cette exposition est ornée de tous les côtés notamment dans le sacrario des mortes d’une quantité de pavillons noirs à tête de mort. Un de ces pavillons figure dans la reconstitution du misérable bureau de Mussolini à Milan. Je suis assez étonné par ça. Je ne connaissais pas cette histoire. Je suis même assez frappé. Ce n’est évidement pas cela qui va me faire acheter une croix de feu en émail ni me changer si peu que ce soit mais c’est assez fort’ (my translation). This letter was first exhibited in the exhibition Raymond Queneau plus intime, held in Paris in April 1978; cf. Carlo Ginzburg, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 143. It was then published in almost integral form, in its original French and in an Italian translation, and with a commentary by the translator in Marina Galletti, ‘Il sacro nell’ideologia del fascismo: Commento ad un inedito di Bataille,’ Alternative 4 (1989): 112–13. Now it has been reprinted integrally in Georges Bataille, Choix de lettres 1917–1962 (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 80–3. 2 Georges Bataille, ‘La structure psychologique du fascisme,’ La Critique sociale 10 (November 1933): 159–65, and 11 (March 1934): 205–11. Now available in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985): 137–60. All quotations are from this 1985 version. 3 Ibid., 142–3. 4 For a brief introduction to Bataille’s life and work see Michael Richardson, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994).

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Notes to pages 4–5

5 See Chapter 6 in this volume. 6 On art under Nazism see Sandra Lotte Esslinger ‘Art in the Third Reich: The Fabrication of National Cultural Identity’ (PhD diss., University of Southern California Los Angeles, 2000); Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992); and The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, ed. B. Taylor and W. van der Will (Winchester, England: Winchester Press, 1990). 7 Among the most recent and comprehensive studies are Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Jeffrey Schnapp, Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for the Masses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), see also the special issue entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Fascism’ of the Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996), and Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. R.J. Golsan (Hanover, N.H.: University of New England Press, 1992). Finally, for a visual documentation of fascist aesthetics see images and essays in the catalogues of the exhibitions Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930–1945 at the Hayward Gallery, London, October 1995–January 1996 (catalogue published by the Hayward Gallery); and Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 1885–1945, at the Wolfsonian Museum, Miami, Fl., 1995 (catalogue published by Thames and Hudson, New York). 8 Compare Adam, Art, 22–39, to Stone, The Patron State, 6. 9 Esslinger, ‘Art in the Third Reich,’ 1–8. 10 Stone, The Patron State, 177–221. 11 Walter Adamson, ‘The Language of Opposition in Early Twentieth-Century Italy: Rhetorical Continuities between Prewar Florentine Avant-Gardism and Mussolini’s Fascism,’ Journal of Modern History 64 (March 1992): 22–51. 12 Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Walter Adamson, ‘Futurism, Mass Culture, and Women: The Reshaping of an Artistic Vocation, 1909–1920,’ Modernism/modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 89–114. 13 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); in particular Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology:

Notes to page 5

14 15

16

17

18 19

20

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From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Walter Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Walter Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922,’ American Historical Review 95, no. 2 (April 1990): 359–90); and ‘Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes and Secular Religion in the Italian Case,’ Journal of Contemporary History 24, no. 3 (July 1989): 411–36. On artistic modernism in the Anglo-German perspective see Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Thomas Crow, ‘Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,’ Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. S. Guilbaut and D. Solkin (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 215–64. Adamson, ‘Futurism,’ 90. See Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1970], 1997) Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). One of the earliest sociological analyses of modernism in art (though the term was not used by the author) was published by José Ortega y Gasset in 1925. There is truly very little that has been added to the theory of modernism in the visual arts elaborated by Ortega in The Dehumanization of Art, and even less that has been corrected by future theorists of its blindness. Indeed, Ortega’s blatant exclusion of futurism from the realm of genuine modern art, and parallel identification of cubism and abstractism as its pinnacles, has continued to mark all following theories of modernism and the avant-garde. Yet Ortega remains rarely acknowledged as either a theorist of modernism or a modernist thinker in his own right. One may suspect that this theoretical amnesia has something to do with the fact that Ortega’s major text, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), openly expressed a complex combination of fear, attraction, and disgust for mass culture harboured by all future theorists of modernism. Yet, more plausibly, it was the very conceptualization of mass culture and society from the point of view of Catholic modernismo, rather than Marxism, that may have doomed Ortega’s theory and Latin modernism with it to prolonged minority status. José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925).

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Notes to pages 6–8

21 On the historical theoretical relationship between aesthetic and Catholic modernisms see Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, AvantGarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 68–86. On the importance of Latin Catholic forms of modernism in general see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), and, by the same author, ‘The Generation of 1914 and Modernism,’ in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, ed. M. Chefdor, R. Quinones and A. Wachtel (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Also on Spanish modernism and the avant-garde see Spanish Cultural Studies: An Introduction. The Struggle for Modernity, ed. H. Graham and J. Lebanyi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 22 Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence. 23 Adamson, ‘Futurism,’ 92. 24 Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), especially 218–76. 25 Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. 26 Jeffrey Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,’ in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard Golsan (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992), 1–32. 27 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press, 1984). 28 This idea has been adumbrated by Adamson in all of his writings and explicitly discussed in Emilio Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,’ Modernism/modernity 1, no. 3 (1994): 55–87. From a very different perspective, the idea of fascism as political modernism also informs Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the AvantGarde (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). 29 On the Nazi view of history in general see Michael Salewski, ‘Geschichte als Waffe: Der Nationalsozialistische Missbrauch,’ Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 14 (1985): 289–310. Salewski’s study examines Hitler’s conceptions of history in comparison to those of Rosenberg, Goebbels, and Himmler. See also Franz-Lothar Kroll, ‘Geschichte und Politik im Weltbild Hitlers,’ Viertelsjahrheft für Zeitgeschichte 44, no. 3 (1996): 327–53. I wish to thank Kristine Semmens for the valuable bibliographical references in notes 30 through 35. 30 George Mosse, ‘Death, Time, and History: Volkish Utopia and Its Transcendence,’ Masses and Men (New York: Howard Fertig, 1980), 69–86. For the dissemination of this apocalyptic view of history in Nazi education see Gilmer W. Blackburn, Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985), especially 22–41.

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31 Ibid., 85. 32 On Nazi historiography see Karl Ferdinand Werner, ‘Die deutsche Historiographie unter Hitler,’ in Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland, ed. Bernd Faulenbach (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1974); Karen Schönwälder, Historiker und Politik: Geschichstwissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992); and, by the same author, ‘The Fascination of Power: Historical Scholarship in Nazi Germany,’ History Workshop Journal, 43 (1997): 133–53. On academic studies of the Bismarck era, see Assunta Esposito, ‘La valutazione dell’opera di Bismarck nella Germania nazionalsocialistica attraverso l’esame della storiografia e della publicistica,’ Storia Contemporanea 9, no. 4 (1978): 663–81. On the teaching of history, see Horst Gies, Geschichstunterricht unter der Diktatur Hitlers (Cologne: Böhlau, 1992); Rainer Riemenschneider, ‘L’enseignement de l’historie, en Allemagne, sous le “IIIe Reich,”’ Francia 7 (1979): 401–28; and Gilmer Blackburn, Education. Finally, on Nazi sites of memory and history see the two volumes by Rudy Koshar, Germany’s Transient Past: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), and From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 33 Koshar, From Monuments, 115–16. 34 Adam, Art, 26–7. 35 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 75–9. 36 Piergiorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del fascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980), 122–3. 37 Ibid., 75. 38 Although the semantic distinction between the adjectives historic and historical was codified only in English, all Romantic linguistic areas have developed ways to distinguish between the idea of a ‘fact’ belonging to the past (historical) and that of an epochal ‘event’ (historic) that belongs to the present of consciousness. 39 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 77. 40 See Luisa Passerini’s bibliographical article ‘Immaginare l’immaginario: Rassegna di libri e termini,’ Linea d’Ombra 7, no. 42 (1989): 19–21. 41 Although mostly intuitive, the notion of collective imaginary developed in this study is partly inspired to the influential theory of the individual imaginary elaborated by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In his continuation and revision of Freudian theory, Lacan distinguished between three orders of human experience, ‘the imaginary,’ ‘the symbolic,’ and ‘the real,’ thereby

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42 43 44 45 46

47 48

49

Notes to pages 11–14 dramatically revising Freud’s influential notions of the unconscious and the ego. For Lacan, the imaginary was a permanent trait of the self, derived from the so-called mirror-stage in the child’s development – that is, from the whole pre-linguistic realm of child-mother relations. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, therefore, the imaginary constitutes a mental space of dual relations with the other/mother to the exclusion of the symbolic/father/language. The imaginary is the space of ambivalence, of fantasy, of the desire for fusion, and of the search for unmediated presence. It is a space, finally, where human consciousness maintains a repetitive, hereditary, and quasimechanic character, as opposed to the symbolic, which connotes the plane where the subject constitutes itself through language, thereby distinguishing between subject and object. While rejecting the sharp polarization posited by Lacan between the psychic world of image (the imaginary) and that of language (the symbolic), my notion of historic imaginary does resonate with the Lacanian stress on the agency of desire (for fusion) in the formation of collective mentalities. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York and London: Norton, 1977), especially 191–7. For an introduction to Lacan’s notion of the imaginary see Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction (London: Free Association Books, 1986), especially 80–2; and Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 82–4. Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario: Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939 (Bari: Laterza, 1991), 6. Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 21. Passerini, ‘Immaginare,’ 20. Unfortunately this important study is still waiting for an English translation. Passerini’s oral history of the popular memory of Mussolini and the regime in the Turin working class supported her analysis in Mussolini immaginario; see Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 61 and 116. On microhistorical methodology and goals see Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,’ Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (Autumn 1993): 10–35; and (from an opposite perspective) F.R. Ankersmit, The Reality Effect in the Writing of History: The Dynamics of Historical Topology (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlanse Akademie Van Wetenschappen, 1989), especially 15–33. Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman, ‘Introduction’ to the special issue ‘Fascism and Culture,’ Stanford Italian Review 8, nos. 1–2 (1992): 215–35.

Notes to pages 14–19

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50 Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory,’ 27. 51 Carlo Ginzburg and Carlo Poni, ‘The Name of the Game: Unequal Exchange and the Historiographical Marketplace,’ in Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe. Selections from Quaderni Storici, ed. E. Muir and C. Ruggiero (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 8. 52 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 33. 53 In particular, see Stone, The Patron State, 128–76; Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations,’ 23; Diane Ghirardo, ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy,’ Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) 45 (February 1992): 70; and Libero Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ (PhD diss., Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1989), 156. 54 Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 109–21. 55 Emilio Gentile’s The Sacralization of Politics has forcefully argued that fascism understood and institutionalized itself as a proper ‘political religion’ with an interlocked set of values, rituals, and myths, which successfully substituted for its well-known lack of an ideological core. From the perspective of the sacralization of politics, the key to the consensus won by fascism among large sectors of the Italian population can be located in the continuities between the Catholic mindset and the institutionalization of a proper cult of fascism. Along parallel lines, see also Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 56 The unique importance of the Italian fascist context to avant-gardist theories of the fascist phenomenon is also visible in the words of Benjamin who, as late as 1936, in defining the fascist aesthetization of politics, could find no Nazi example and referred to the relationship between Mussolini’s fascism and Marinetti’s futurism. See, in particular, Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 241–2. 57 Bataille, Visions, 243–5. 58 E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Presentation (London: Phaidon, 1968); David Freedberg, The Power of Images; and W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 59 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), and E.H. Gombrich, ‘Style,’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 15, D. Sills ed. (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1982), 352–61. 60 H. Aram Veeser, ‘Introduction,’ in The New Historicism, ed. H.A. Veeser (London: Routledge, 1989), xi, and Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Psychoanalysis and

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Renaissance Culture,’ in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. P. Parker and D. Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 217. 61 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 28. 62 Alexandre Kojève, Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit Assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, [1947], 1969), 147–52; and Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 1. History Belongs to the Present 1 ‘Non ci meravigliamo, signori, se accanto agli imboscati della guerra troviamo quelli della storia, i quali, non avendo per molte ragioni e anche per la loro impotenza creativa, potuto produrre l’evento, cioè fare la storia prima di scriverla, ora consumano la loro vendetta diminuendola senza obiettività o vergogna.’ Benito Mussolini, ‘Risposta al Senato sui patti lateranenzi,’ in Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini: Edizione definitiva vol. 7 (Milan: Hoelpi, 1939), 117 (my translation). 2 Carlo De Frede, ‘Il giudizio di Mussolini su Croce,’ Storia e Politica 22, no. 1 (March 1983): 122. 3 Most traditional studies of fascist ideology have answered this question negatively, emphasizing the pragmatic nature of fascism, its lack of doctrinal coherence, and its reliance on myths rather than philosophical premises. More recently, Zeev Sternhell has traced the origins of fascist ideology to the ‘anti-materialist revision of Marxism’ headed by George Sorel, but has found no trace of a genuine philosophy of history in the ideological compound of Italian fascism. Similarly, for Piergiorgio Zunino, a sense of time and history was central to the formation of fascist ideology, but this ideology was not the province of Mussolinian speeches but the work of intellectuals, journalists, and historians who collaborated to give a fascist face to the Italian past. See Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (1918–1925) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975), republished without modifications in 1996; Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maria Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994); Piergiorgio Zunino, L’ideologia del fascismo. Miti, credenze e valori nella stabilizzazione del regime (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980), especially 63–129. 4 De Frede, 123. 5 Giovanni Belardelli, ‘Il Fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura,’ in Storia d’Italia 4: Guerre e fascismo, 1914–1943 (Bari: Laterza, 1997), 394. 6 Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi vol. 5 (Milan: Hoepli, 1934–39), 279–84. On

Notes to pages 22–5

7 8

9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16

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the relationship between fascism and art, see Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), especially 43–54. Belardelli, ‘Il Fascismo,’ 395. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Los Angeles, Berkeley, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 26. On the Critica Fascista debate, see Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman, ‘Selections from the Great Debate on Fascism and Culture,’ Stanford Italian Review 8, no. 1/2: 235–72; on fascist patronage of art, and fascist art culture in general, see Stone, The Patron State. On Hitler and the Nazification of German art, see Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992); and The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and the Film in the Third Reich, ed. B. Taylor and W. van der Will (Winchester, England: Winchester Press, 1990). See Laura Malvano, Fascismo e politica dell’immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988). Zunino, L’ideologia, 63, 72, and 71. Renzo De Felice, ‘Gli storici italiani nel periodo fascista,’ in Intellettuali difronte al fascismo: Saggi e note documentarie (Rome: Bonacci, 1985), 191. Zunino, L’ideologia, 65 and 75. For a discussion of the relationship between fascist ideology and Mazzini’s thought, see Giovanni Belardelli, ‘Il fantasma di Rousseau: Fascismo, nazionalsocialismo e vera democrazia,’ Storia contemporanea (June 1994): 361–89; and Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1–19. The best introduction to the intellectual development of Gentile’s philosophy is in Eugenio Garin’s introduction to Giovanni Gentile: Opere filosofiche, ed. E. Garin (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 13–80. For a recent discussion of the relationship between actualism and fascism with many points of contact with this study, see Fabio Vander, L’estetizzazione della politica: Il fascismo come antiItalia (Bari: Dedalo, 2001). Unfortunately, the bibliography on Gentile in English is rather small. Thanks to James Gregor we finally have a synthetic intellectual biography in English, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunsnick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001). For a contemporary account of Gentile’s philosophy in English see Patrick Romanell, The Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile: An Inquiry into Gentile’s Concept of Experience (New York: Vanni, 1938). The only extensive treatment of Gentile’s philosophy in English is still H.S. Harris, The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960), which focuses, however, on Gentile’s last

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Notes to pages 25–6

book, Genesi e struttura della società (Firenze: Sansoni 1946), edited and translated by H.S. Harris as Genesis and Structure of Society (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960) with its useful ‘Bibliography of Gentile’s Studies in English,’ 53–63. See also by the same author, ‘Gentile’s “The Reform of Hegelian Dialectics,”’ Idealistic Studies 11 (1981): 187–8; and Richard Bellamy, ‘Giovanni Gentile,’ in Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 100–14. Insightful comments comparing Croce’s and Gentile’s philosophical systems can be found in M.E. Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature and History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987); and David D. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987). The only philosophical works of Gentile published in English are The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (1916), translated from the third edition of Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro by H.W. Carr (London: Macmillan, 1922); The Reform of Education, a translation of La riforma dell’educazione (1920) by D. Bigongiari, with an introduction by B. Croce (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1922); ‘The Philosophical Basis of Fascism,’ Foreign Affairs 6, no. 2 (January 1928): 290–304; ‘The Transcending of Time in History,’ in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936); and The Philosophy of Art (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972). 17 The reflections written by Antonio Gramsci in his famous Quaderni dal carcere on Croce and Gentile’s philosophical propositions – now collected in Antonio Gramsci, Croce and Gentile (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992) – have long constituted an obligatory point of reference for any historical treatment of their relationship. See, for example, Jader Jacobelli, Croce Gentile: Dal sodalizio al dramma, with a preface by Norberto Bobbio (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989); and Norberto Bobbio, Profilo ideologico del novecento italiano (Turin: Einaudi, 1986). The bibliography (in Italian) on the personal and philosophical relationship between Croce and Gentile is immense; for the most recent titles see Sara Bonechi, ‘B. Croce – G. Gentile: Bibliografia, 1980–1993,’ in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana: Croce e Gentile un secolo dopo, 6th series, vol. 14, nos. 2–3 (May–December 1994): 529–660. For a critical appraisal and useful bibliographic information on Crocean and Gentilian studies in English, see David D. Roberts, ‘La fortuna di Croce e Gentile negli Stati Uniti,’ in the same volume, 253–81. 18 The term ‘Giolittian’ refers to the symbolic shadow that the long-lasting political rule of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti cast on liberal politics and culture in fin de siècle Italy and beyond. See Emilio Gentile, ‘From the Cultural Revolt of the Giolittian Era to the Ideology of Fascism,’ in Studies in

Notes to pages 26–8

19 20 21

22

23 24 25 26 27 28

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Modern Italian History: From the Risorgimento to the Republic, ed. F.J. Coppa (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), 106. On the history of the two manifestos, see Emilio Papa, Storia di due manifesti: Il Fascismo e la cultura italiana (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1958). Ibid., 29 and 43. Essentially, Gentile posited actualism as a philosophical revision of Hegelian idealism conducted from the point of view of the theological dualism of ‘immanence’ (i.e., God/meaning existing only within nature, man, and mind) and ‘transcendence’ (i.e. God/meaning pre-existing outside nature, man, and mind). As a philosophy of ‘absolute immanentism,’ actualism was specifically meant to deliver both Catholic religion and idealist philosophy from the error of transcendental thought. For Gentile, the spirit was neither immediate nor transcendental but immanent in the act by which the subject posits something as an object of thought and, in the active process of thinking, overcomes its objectivity and ultimately recognizes it as its own individual spirit. Read in reverse, Gentile argued, the individual act of thought was also the only way in which the eternal spirit revealed itself to itself. For Gentile, the elimination of the transcendental synthesis allowed the recognition of the reciprocal immanence of spirit and matter and all the dualities they engendered. Hence the immanent union of theory and practice, philosophy and religion, and consciousness and will, in which Gentile saw the overcoming of both Hegelian and Marxist dialectics by actualism’s ‘absolute immanentism,’ and where Croce, instead, identified the mystical essence of actualism. Benedetto Croce, ‘Misticismo e idealismo,’ La Voce 3, no. 11 (November 1913), now in Giuseppe Prezzolini, La Voce, 1908–1913: Cronologia, antologia fortuna di una rivista (Milan: Rusconi, 1974), 507. Augusto Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile: Per una interpretazione filosofica della storia contemporanea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 268. For a detailed treatment of Gentile’s intellectual and political life see Gabriele Turi, Giovanni Gentile: Una biografia (Florence: Giunti, 1995). Giovanni Gentile, ‘Mazzini,’ Politica 1, no. 2 (January 1919), 185–205; and ‘Ciò che è vivo in Mazzini,’ Politica 1, no. 3 (March 1919): 337–54. Giovanni Gentile, ‘Il Fascismo e la Sicilia,’ in Che cos’è il fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1925), 32. A more thorough discussion of Gentile’s Risorgimental paradigm can be found in Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile. On the debate concerning Volpe’s intellectual leadership in the organization of Italian historiography during fascism, compare Gabriele Turi, ‘Il problema Volpe,’ Studi Storici 19 (January 1978): 175–86, and De Felice, ‘Gli

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36 37

38 39 40

Notes to pages 28–32 storici italiani’ 190–243. See also Armando Saitta, ‘L’organizzazione degli studi storici,’ in Federico Chabod e la ‘nuova storiografia’ italiana dal primo al secondo dopoguerra, ed. B. Vigezzi (Milan: Jaca Book, 1982); 511–13; Massimo Miozzi, La scuola storica romana, 1926–1943 (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1982); Delio Cantimori, ‘Note sugli studi storici dal 1926 al 1951,’ in Storici e storia (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), 268–80, and ‘Gli studi di storia moderna e contemporanea,’ in Cinquant’anni di vita intellettuale italiana, 1896–1946, ed. C. Antoni and R. Mattioli (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1950). On the participation of other historiographical schools in the creation of fascist historical culture see Antonio Casali, Storici italiani fra le due guerre: La ‘nuova rivista storica,’ 1917–1943 (Naples: Guida, 1980). Zunino, L’ideologia, 76. De Felice, ‘Gli storici,’ 191. Giovanni Belardelli, Il mito della ‘nuova italia’: Gioacchino Volpe tra guerra e fascismo (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1988), 25 Ibid., 108–23. Volpe, L’Italia in cammino, 18. Giovanni Belardelli, ‘Introduzione,’ in ibid, xx. Ibid., xvii, and De Frede, ‘Il giudizio,’ 123. See also Gioacchino Volpe, ‘Motivi e aspetti della presente storiografia italiana,’ Nuova Antologia 67 (December 1931): 290–305. For a discerning and balanced discussion of the differences among the two texts, see Belardelli, ‘Introduzione,’ xxvii–xxix, and xxx–xxxi. Croce’s distinction between Risorgimental epic and real history is in L’Italia dal 1914 al 1918: Pagine sulla guerra (Bari: Laterza, 1921), 136: cited in Belardelli, ‘Introduzione,’ xxix. Croce’s judgment on Volpe is in Storia della storiografia nel secolo decimonono, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1930), 234–5; cited in Belardelli, ‘Introduzione,’ xxvi. Belardelli, ‘Introduzione,’ xxxi. Belardelli, Il mito, 69–87. As Belardelli rightly notes, Volpe’s narrative had not stressed, explored, or affirmed the history-making function of historical myths, but rather contrasted the instrumental function of myths with a naturalized epoch. The organizing metaphor of the book pointed the reader’s attention toward a ‘naturalistic rather than mystical-theological’ vision of the march of the Italian nation toward sociopolitical integration and international greatness. Volpe had thus presented the making of fascist Italy as the result of a century-long ‘“physiological and social” growth arising out of the irrepressible

Notes to pages 32–6

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43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50

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energy of the Italian people, and rooted in their demographic “vitality”’ (Belardelli, ‘Introduzione,’ xxi). Benedetto Croce, ‘Vent’anni fa: Ricordo della pubblicazione di un libro,’ in Quaderni della Critica 4, no. 10 (1948): 111–12 (my emphasis). Cited in De Frede, ‘Il giudizio,’ 126. For a useful discussion of the debate on art in relation to the debate on historiography, see Giovanni Belardelli, ‘Il Fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura.’ Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133. Ibid. Ibid., 133 and 123. On the crucial function of Mussolini’s speech events for the formation of fascist aesthetic politics, see also Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle. Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, 105–10. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) s.v. ‘historic,’ ‘historical.’ The Italian expressions un evento storico and un discorso storico carry the same semantic charge of a historic event and a historic speech. Consider the revisionist spell exercised by the defining historic event of our times, the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even in spoken English the semantic distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘historic’ is often lost. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’ (1874), in Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 57–123. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), cited in James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, [1919], 1987). Hayden White, ‘The Modernist Event,’ in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 21–2. Ibid., 20 and 51. On the generational fascination with fascism see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); on the virilist rhetoric characterizing even the writings of antifascist critics and theoreticians such as Walter Benjamin see Spackman, Fascist Virilities, 24–33. Spackman, 123. See in particular Giovanni Gentile, La filosofia di Marx (Pisa: Spoerri, 1899),

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Notes to pages 36–9 ‘Il concetto della storia,’ Studi Storici 8 (1899): 103–33 and 169–201; and La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (Messina: Principato, 1913). In order of publication: ‘I primi scritti di Benedetto Croce sul concetto della storia’ (1897); Il materialismo storico (1899); La filosofia di Marx (1899); ‘Il metodo storico nelle scienze sociali’ (1901); ‘Filosofia e storia della filosofia’ (1902); ‘La storia come scienza’ (1902); ‘Il problema della filosofia della storia’ (1903); ‘Il concetto della storia della filosofia’ (1907); ‘Il circolo della filosofia e della storia della filosofia’ (1909); ‘Il concetto della grammatica’ (1910); ‘Il valore della storia e il formalismo assoluto’ (1910); ‘Il concetto del progresso’ (1911); ‘Il metodo dell’immanenza’ (1912); ‘Il problema delle scienze storiche’ (1915); ‘L’esperienza pura e la realtà storica’ (1915); ‘Politica e filosofia’ (1918). Giovanni Gentile, ‘Benedetto Croce: Il concetto della storia nelle sue relazioni col concetto dell’arte,’ Studi Storici 6 (1897), 137–52. All of these articles, and most other writings by Gentile on the philosophy of history have been collected and republished in Giovanni Gentile. Opere. Frammenti di estetica e di teoria della storia, vols. 47–8 (Florence: Le Lettere, 1992). For a detailed commentary on the intense dialogue between Croce and Gentile on the problem of history, see Michele Biscione, ‘Il tema della storia nella corrispondenza Croce-Gentile, 1896–1899,’ Rivista di Storia della Storiografia Moderna 4, no. 3 (1983): 3–43. For a comprehensive and insightful discussion of the development of Gentile’s theory of history from the early writings on Marx to the essays published in the mid-1930s, see Antimo Negri, ‘Il concetto attualistico della storia e lo storicismo,’ in Giovanni Gentile: La vita e il pensiero, vol. 10 (Florence: Sansoni, 1962), 1–220. Prezzolini, La Voce, 512, 515, and 510. G. Gentile, ‘L’Esperienza pura,’ quoted in Garin, ed., Giovanni Gentile: Opere filosofiche, 410. Negri, ‘Il concetto attualistico,’ 81. Immanuel Kant, ‘The Contest of Faculties and Other Writings,’ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 182, 183, and 181. Negri, ‘Il concetto attualistico,’ 45. Ibid., 412, 422, and 426. Ibid., 422 and 425. This statement plainly reveals Gentile’s debt to another eighteenth-century founder of the philosophy of history, Giambattista Vico. Given the scope of this work I have left aside any discussion of Vico’s fundamental influence on Gentile’s theories of history and aesthetics, but one could argue that Gentile always read ‘Kant according to Vico.’ For an appraisal of Gentile’s relationship to Vico, see Giovanni Gentile, Opere: Studi vichiani, vol. 16 and Antimo Negri, ‘Le Teorie estetiche di Giovanni Gentile,’

Notes to pages 39–44

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68 69 70 71 72

73

74 75

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in Giovanni Gentile: La Vita e il pensiero vol. 9 (Florence: Sansoni, 1961), 57–188. G. Gentile, ‘L’Esperienza pura,’ 423–25. Del Noce points out that Gentile’s argument in ‘Politica e filosofia’ coincided with Mussolini’s drift, after 1917, away from ‘socialist-revolutionary interventionism’ and toward the antisocialist, liberal-nationalist compound of the early fascist movement. For Del Noce, Mussolini’s choice of Gentile as his first minister of education in 1922 should thus be considered as an implicit and belated recognition that actualism and fascism had already converged on the immanent synthesis of politics and philosophy articulated by Gentile in ‘Politica e filosofia.’ Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile, 360. Turi, Giovanni Gentile, 254. Ibid., 150, 156, 157, 157. G. Gentile, ‘Politica e filosofia,’ in Dopo la vittoria: Nuovi frammenti politici (Rome: Edizioni La Voce, 1920), 145 (my emphasis). Ibid., 148 (my emphasis). Giovanna Procacci, ‘Aspetti della mentalità collettiva durante la guerra: L’Italia dopo Caporetto,’ in La Grande Guerra: Esperienza, memoria, immagini, ed. Dino Leoni and Camillo Zadra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 261–89. Leninism, Gentile argued in a related article, was unrealistic because it ‘negated the political substance common to all individuals, groups and social classes,’ just as Kantian liberalism had become obsolete because it had maintained a distinction between moral and political action. G. Gentile, ‘Lenin,’ in Giovanni Gentile: Opere. Guerra e fede, vol. 43 (Florence: Le Lettere, 1987), 441–2. Ibid., 156. Intellectual historians of fascist ideology have consistently neglected the importance of Gentile’s prolonged flirtation with Marxism between the 1890s and the early 1920s. See, for example, Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (1918–1925) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975), especially 397–418, and Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile, 283–96. Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maria Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 12. Not even Sternhell, however, includes Gentile among the principal figures of Marxist revisionism. Compare with Antimo Negri, ‘Attualismo e marxismo,’ in Giovanni Gentile: La vita e le opere, vol. 9, 189– 218, and Del Noce’s discussion of Sternhell’s thesis in Giovanni Gentile, 7–16. Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile, 268. See Elvio Fachinelli, ‘Il fenomeno fascista,’ in La freccia ferma: Tre tentativi di annullare il tempo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), 135–52; and, for a specific study

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86 87 88

Notes to pages 44–6 of the mental world of Italian soldiers, Antonio Gibelli, L’officina della guerra: La grande guerra e la trasformazione del mondo mentale (Turin: Bollati Bordighieri, 1991), especially 3–16 and 76–121. On the decisive contribution of modernist intellectuals to the creation and multifaceted development of an Italian myth of the Great War and its impact on soldiers, see Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), especially 323–94. There is no specific study in English on the Italian experience of the Great War. Fachinelli, ‘Il fenomeno fascista,’ 143. Fachinelli’s hypothesis finds historical support in the studies cited above, which confirm that ambivalence toward the military near catastrophe of Caporetto was a result of the conflicting war mentalities of interventionists and noninterventionists. In particular, see Belardelli, Il mito della nuova italia, 67–75, and Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra, 261–96. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 148–9. Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism. The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903– 1922,’ American Historical Review 95 (1990): 360. Walter Adamson has articulated the theoretical-historical definition of Italian modernist culture in several studies: ‘Fascism and Culture: Avant-Gardes and Secular Religion in the Italian Case,’ Journal of Contemporary History 24 (1989): 411–35; ‘Modernism and Fascism’; and Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), especially 1–14. See also Emilio Gentile, ‘The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,’ Modernism/modernity 1, no. 3 (September 1994): 55–88. Turi, Giovanni Gentile, 194. On Gentile’s relationship with La Voce, see also Emilio Gentile, La Voce e l’età giolittiana (Milan: Pan, 1972); Giuseppe Prezzolini, Il tempo della Voce (Milan: Longanesi e Vallecchi, 1960); and Walter L. Adamson, Avant-Garde Florence. Scipio Slataper, letter to Prezzolini, 21 April 1911; published in Prezzolini, Il tempo della Voce, 397; also quoted in Turi, Giovanni Gentile, 220. Giovanni Gentile, ‘L’atto del pensare come atto puro,’ Annuario della biblioteca filosofica di Palermo 1 (1912): 27–42. For Gentile, with the invention of a single God – both creator and incarnated in the man-God Christ – Christianity had initially rejected Platonic transcendentalism, only to readmit it later through the back door with the concepts of grace and supernatural revelation. These concepts Gentile saw as the basis of Protestantism. Rejecting instead all supernatural and mythological aspects of Christianity, actualism literally resolved the Catholic Trinity

Notes to pages 46–8

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91

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93

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into a single self-creating Spirit, replacing the ‘Holy’ attribute with the fundamental character of divinity: creation. Gentile’s combined reform of Hegelian dialectics and Catholicism thus coincided in the personalization of the creative God-Act. The Holy Trinity and the triadic movement of dialectics were unified in the eternal movement of the self-creative act: the subjectthought poses itself before an object (of thought/action), which, in the interactive process of thinking-writing-reading, it overcomes and perceives as belonging to itself as subject. Del Noce, Giovanni Gentile, 268. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, ed. V. Gerratana, vol. 3 (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), 2038. For a discussion of futurism’s antirepresentational syntax, see Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). Along with the fertile relationship between Gentile and La Voce, the growing influence of Gentile on the vociani is confirmed by the reception of Croce’s critique of actualism. Croce’s condemnation of actualism published by La Voce in late 1913 by no means tarnished Gentile’s philosophical credentials. On the contrary, it had serious repercussions for the vociani because the intellectual enemy indicated by Croce in the final lines of his article was none other than the figure of the actualist intellectual that some of them had begun endorsing and praising in their writings. By and large the debate that followed the exchange between Croce and Gentile in La Voce was no longer about the philosophical truth of their positions but rather about adopting a moderate version of actualism, or a more mystical ‘undiscriminating activism.’ Turi, Giovanni Gentile, 220. On the delicate question of the relationship between Croce, Gentile, and the modernist cultural front illustrated by Adamson, I do not agree with the author’s recent inclusion of Croce in the first generation of what he terms the Italian ‘modernist avant-garde.’ See Adamson, ‘Modernism and Fascism,’ 368, and compare with ‘Benedetto Croce and the Death of Ideology,’ Journal of Modern History 55, no. 2 (June 1983): 208–36, where Adamson mentions neither the term avant-garde nor the term modernism. Hayden White, ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and DeSublimation,’ in Content of the Form (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 74. Hayden White, ‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,’ in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution,’ ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 49. T.S. Eliot ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), cited in James Longenbach, Modernist Poetics of History.

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Notes to pages 48–9

96 For the history of modern ‘historical semantics,’ see Reinhard Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). 97 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘historic.’ 98 Henrico Estienne, Thesaurus Grecae Linguae, vol. 3 (Paris: Royal French Institute of Typography, 1831), 1064. 99 H.G. Lindell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, vol. 1 (Oxford: Claredion Press, 1925), 564. 100 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Ekphrasis and Quotations,’ Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 20 (March 1988): 3–19. In the ensuing discussion of the relationship between enàrgeia and Greek-Latin historical culture, I rely also on Andrew D. Walker, ‘Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography,’ Transactions of the American Philological Association, 123 (1993): 353–77; G. Zanker, ‘Enargeia in the Ancient Criticism of Poetry,’ Reinisches Museum für Philologie 124 (1981): 297–311; A.J. Goodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography; Four Studies (Portland: Areopagica Press, 1988); and James Davidson, ‘The Gaze of Polybius,’ Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991): 10–24. In addition, my argument is informed by Sande Cohen’s critique of Ginzburg’s ‘Desire for History: Historiography, Scholarship, and the Vicarious (on C. Ginzburg),’ Storia della Storiografia 30 (1996): 68–9, as well as Murray Krieger’s discussion of enàrgeia as the sign of ‘literature’s impulse to become visual’ in Ekphrasis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially 67–89. See also Roy Park, ‘“Ut Pictura Poesis”: The Nineteenth-Century Aftermath,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 155–64; James Heffernann, ‘Space and Time in Literature and the Visual Arts,’ Soundings 70, nos. 1–2 (Spring/ Summer 1987): 95–119; and Joseph Frank, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature,’ Sewanee Review 53 (1945): 221–40. Finally, my whole approach to the question of representation in Western culture is indebted to W.T.J. Mitchell’s theoretical insights on the relationship between word and image in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 101 Ginzburg, ‘Ekphrasis,’ 7. 102 As Walker explains, the truth-presence effect of enàrgeia in Greek historiography was often achieved by complex descriptions of the reactions of viewers to the events under narration in order to invite the reader to identify with the emotions of the onlookers. Walker, ‘Enàrgeia,’ 357. 103 Paradigmatic in this respect was Quintilien’s famous definition of evidentia. For Quintilien, in fact, evidentia in narratione secured only ‘the appearance of palpability’ and was therefore equally useful to those who strive to ‘obscure the situation’ and ‘those who state the false in lieu of the true.’ Quintilien, Institutio Oratoria 4, no. 2: 64–5; cited in Ginzburg, ‘Ekphrasis,’ 15.

Notes to pages 49–54

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104 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Représentation: Le mot, l’idée, la chose’ in Annales ESC, 6 (November–December 1991): 1224. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid., 1230. 107 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 161–91. 108 Ibid., 77–9. 2. Il Duce Taumaturgo 1 ‘I musei del dolore,’ Riforma sociale (20 October 1920): 8–10. The article was republished by its author, Antonio Monti, in 1953. 2 Enzo Collotti, ‘Una istituzione berlinese degli anni venti: Lo Internationales Anti-Kriegs-Museum,’ in La Grande Guerra: Esperienza, memoria, immagini, ed. D. Leoni and C. Zadra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 715–43. 3 Ibid., 734. 4 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 227. 5 Ibid., 95. 6 Antonio Monti, ‘Una carezza di Mussolini e l’archivio della guerra,’ Milano (October 1930): 1. 7 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario: Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939 (Bari: Laterza, 1991). See in particular 15–22. 8 As historian, conference-goer, and journalist, Antonio Monti situated himself at the very centre of the formation of fascist historical discourse. During the ventennio, Monti published thirty-five monographs and over a hundred articles on topics related to the Risorgimento or the Great War in both professional and cultural journals. Much more numerous were his almost weekly articles on the first and third pages of the Corriere della Sera. Several of these were dedicated to ‘hot’ professional topics, such as the relationship between the Risorgimento and ‘contemporary history,’ and the periodization of the Risorgimental epoch. See Antonio Monti, ‘Trent’anni di studi sui documenti del museo del risorgimento e del museo di guerra di Milano, 1914–1944,’ abstract from Rivista storica del Risorgimento (no date): 1–15. 9 In 1920, Monti published a detailed record of his experience in the commission entitled Combattenti e silurati (Ferrara: STET, 1920). 10 During the conflict, a futurist image of the ‘war-pharmacon’ had also circulated widely on the interventionist front. See Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 179–260.

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11 Obviously, in Monti’s case, this connection was also biographical. Born to unknown parents on 26 October 1882, Monti was brought up in a Milanese Catholic orphanage and attended private Catholic schools and university in Milan. Antonio Monti, ‘Ricordi di un direttore di museo,’ Nuova Antologia (October 1949): 22–42. 12 Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 110. 13 For his socialist comrades Mussolini had been ‘l’uomo nuovo’ (the new man), and this image had been romanticized during the war by the portrait of invulnerability of the interventionist Mussolini published by Torquato Nanni in 1915. Yet, from the beginning and through all of its permutations, Mussolini’s image was also marked by a congenital duplicity: from revolutionary to man of order and vice versa. As a social phenomenon, the coalescence of mussolinismo is thus traceable to the immediate aftermath of the Great War, and specifically to the interaction between this Janus-faced Mussolini and the ambivalent mass imaginary that emerged from the war. ‘To the collective crisis of identity, following the end of the conflict,’ Passerini writes, ‘Mussolinism offered a solution on the terrain of the imaginary not devoid of real footholds in the new relations between power and masses’ (Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 66–7). 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 16 Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, 6 and 226. 17 Ibid., 66, 39, 61. 18 Ibid., 61 and 116. 19 Monti, ‘Una carezza,’ 1. 20 I am referring here to W.J.T. Mitchell’s definition of ‘hypericons’ as ‘figures of figuration, pictures that reflect on the nature of images.’ W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 158–60. 21 Antonio Monti, Confidenze agli amici del Museo del Risorgimento di Milano (Milan: Capo d’anno editions, 1936), 3. 22 Antonio Monti, ‘Il museo del Risorgimento italiano nel Castello Sforzesco di Milano,’ Bollettino dell’Ufficio Storico (1 July 1926). 23 After a historiographical and administrative battle that lasted for over a decade, Monti succeeded in 1939 in changing the official name of his museum to the Civic Institute of Contemporary History. Antonio Monti, ‘Il civico istituto per la storia contemporanea di Milano,’ Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento (May 1939), 3–4. 24 Ministero Pubblica Istruzione (MPI), Bollettino Ufficiale, no. 15, 10 April 1928,

Notes to pages 58–61

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circolare no. 34, and Antonio Monti, ‘L’Archivio della guerra,’ La Lettura (November 1925): 826. Antonio Monti, ‘Incremento e iniziative del museo del Risorgimento di Milano nel 1928,’ in Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento, Atti del XVI Congresso Sociale: Tenuto in Bologna l’8, 9 e 10 novembre 1928 (Rome, 1929), 4. Antonio Monti, ‘Fondamento scientifico del catalogo per soggietti dell’Archivio della Guerra con un saggio di ricerca sul tema: espressione popolare del sentimento religioso nei soldati meridionali,’ Rendiconti del Reale Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere 67 (1934): 1–2. Among the first we find: high culture, art in war, patriotic songs, military caricatures, illustrated postcards, censorship, culture, war diaries, prison notebooks, drawings, photographs, futurism, war iconography, teachers, intellectuals, inventions, popular literature of war, posters, monuments to the fallen, war museums, patriotic music, commemorations of the fallen, patriotic poems, Austrian propaganda, Italian anti-war propaganda, AustroHungarian anti-war propaganda, Italian military patriotic propaganda, satire, wartime science, wartime school, the press, soldier’s theatre, propaganda theater, wartime humour, universities. In the second group we find a peculiar combination of subjects such as: wartime love, filial love, war atrocities, self-destructiveness, national consciousness, privations and destitution, antiwar sentiment, women in the war, eroticism, children in the war, war folklore, wartime generosity, justice, soldiers’ letters, books of prayers, maternal sentiment, lies, morality, hatred, wartime compassion, psychiatry, war psychology, wartime religion, resistance, retaliation, superstitions. Monti, ‘Fondamento,’ 12–18. Stephen Bann, The Inventions of History: Essays on the Representation of the Past (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 109. Bann has also developed this in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Romanticism and the Rise of History (New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1995). Bann, The Inventions of History, 142–3. I have acquired this information from Monti’s only surviving daughter, Ernestina (age 72), who has preserved the entire run of La Critica collected by her father, five letters of Croce to Monti, and the memory of a long meeting between the two in the early 1950s in which they exchanged reminiscences of their youthful encounters. Antonio Monti, ‘Le date estreme di un martirologio glorioso,’ Nuova Antologia vol. 53 (November 1918): 3–5. Antonio Monti, ‘Museo patriottico e documentazione storica delle vicende

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42 43 44 45

Notes to pages 61–4 politiche e civili d’Italia dalla fine del secolo XVIII ai giorni nostri,’ Archivio del comune di Milano (ACM): Istruzione Pubblica (IP), ‘Museo del Risorgimento,’ cartella 13, 1926–27. The following paragraphs are based on my own research as well as on Massimo Baioni, ‘I musei del Risorgimento. Santuari laici dell’Italia liberale,’ Passato e Presente 29 (May–August 1993): 57–86; and, by the same author, La ‘religione della patria’: Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale, 1884–1918 (Treviso: Pagus, 1994). Baioni, ‘I musei,’ 73. As Baioni himself notes, this model of selection and display matches Bann’s definition of the Romantic poetics of Du Sommerard’s Musèe de Cluny; cf. Bann, The Clothing of Clio, 85. Ibid., 74. Atti del Primo Congresso per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano tenutosi in Milano nel novembre 1906 (Milan: Tipografia Lanzani, 1907), 79. Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (Vienna-Leipzig, 1903), translated by K.W. Forster and D. Ghirardo as ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,’ Oppositions 25 (1982): 21–51. Ibid., 24 and 21. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis, Mo.: Telos Press, 1981), 133 (my emphasis). Società Nazionale per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano (SNSRI), Atti del XII Congresso: Tenutosi in Torino nei giorni 17–18–19 ottobre 1924, (Casale, 1925), 72. Here, Monti’s words echoed those of the two historians, Achille Bertarelli and Giuseppe Gallavresi, who, in 1906, had openly attacked Corio’s defense of memory value. Their statements had become the manifesto of a ‘scientific’ and ‘intellectual’ resistance against the dominant ‘sentimental’ approach subscribed to by Corio and a majority of museum curators. After the war, Bertarelli and Gallavresi became Monti’s principal allies in the restructuring of the MRM. It was Bertarelli’s donation of his historical collection of Great War newspapers and printed propaganda that allowed the establishment of Monti’s Archive of War. As for Gallavresi, he became the Milanese Assessore alla Cultura (municipal official in charge of culture) in 1924. From this position he became Monti’s political patron and the primary provider of the museum’s financial support. Monti, ‘Il Museo del Risorgimento italiano.’ SNSRI, Atti del XII Congresso, 69. Ibid., 73. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’

Notes to pages 64–73

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in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 218. Ibid., 222. By ‘not-properly-patriotic items,’ Monti meant ‘materials pertaining to the reactionary or enemy camp, or concerning the political, economic, and civic life of the country, from the intellectual debates of ideas to the battles for health and social progress (such as those against pellagra, tuberculosis, alcoholism, illiteracy).’ SNSRI, Atti del XII Congresso, 73. Ibid., 74. Unfortunately, a reconstruction of Monti’s curatorial practices can be at best tentative and conjectural. Both Monti’s private archive and the museum’s administrative archives were destroyed during World War II. All we have are a few photographs of the museum’s archive, library, and central hall that were published in 1926, and these do not permit an overall evaluation of Monti’s restructuring of the display or of his success in implementing his stated plans. However, a number of written statements concerning the museum’s activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s allow us to at least test the consistency of Monti’s commitment to the innovations he announced in 1924. Baioni, ‘I musei,’ 17. The fusion between the Risorgimento and the Great War would take place only after 1932. See the epilogue in this study. Antonio Monti, Museo del Risorgimento nazionale di Milano: Guida (Milan: Comune di Milano 1926), 5. Antonio Monti, ‘Museo patriottico,’ 5; ACM: IP, cartella 13, 1926–27. Baioni, ‘I musei,’ 73. Antonio Monti, ‘Il Museo del Risorgimento di Milano,’ Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento 19, no. 4 (October–December 1932): 4–6. Ibid., 6. Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra, 167–260. 3. Historic Spectacle

1 Until 1932 the pilgrimage to the general’s tomb on the small Sardinian island of Caprera was the only ritual commemorating Garibaldi’s death. Beginning in 1887, it had been organized every five years by the Roman Association of Garibaldian Veterans (Società di Mutuo Soccorso Giuseppe Garibaldi) (SMSGG), a mutual aid society founded by Garibaldi himself in 1871 and headed by his eldest son, Menotti Garibaldi. These commemorative pilgrimages had been interrupted during World War I, but on 2 June 1922 they were resumed in public form by the general’s second son, Ricciotti

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Notes to pages 73–6 Garibaldi Sr, on the very occasion of his public pronunciation of support for fascism. All of the documents regarding the government sponsorship of the Garibaldian celebrations are stored in the Archivio centrale di stato, Rome (ACS): Presidenza Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM), 1931–33, Cinquantenario Giuseppe Garibaldi, f. 14.5.701/1–34 (henceforth cited as ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/ #). All Italian newspapers dedicated entire front pages to the celebrations, and L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE) edited an astonishing nine hundred metres of positive film to produce one silent and one sound documentary as well as three silent and two sound newsreels. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 33. Benito Mussolini, ‘Relazione alla camera sugli accordi del laterano, 14 maggio 1929’ in Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini: Edizione definitiva 7 (Milan: Hoepli, 1939), 54. Menandro Greco, Il Monumento ad Anita Garibaldi: L’Arte (Rome: Lux, 1907). All requests for local activities received by the PCM were denied with a standard response that underlined their ‘interference with the national events planned in Rome.’ Not even the prestigious ad hoc Lombard Commemorative Committee was allowed to stage the series of planned commemorative events it had hoped to hold in Milan between 2 and 5 June. ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/23. Anita died of illness and exhaustion near Ravenna in November 1849, during Garibaldi’s flight from the fallen Republic. According to sympathetic reports, Garibaldi was ‘obliged’ to abandon dying Anita in a hurry because French pursuers were closing in on them. On the issue of Garibaldi’s problematic nationalization in the pre-fascist era, see Omar Calabrese, Garibaldi: Tra Ivanohe e Sandokan (Milan: Electa Calabrese, 1982); Mario Isnenghi, ‘Usi politici di Garibaldi, dall’interventismo al fascismo,’ in Garibaldi condottiero: storia, teoria, prassi, ed. F. Mazzonis (Milan: Angeli, 1984), 533–44; and Bruno Tobia, Una patria per gl’italiani (Bari: Laterza, 1991), 163–80. For a related evaluation of the difficulties encountered by the founders and directors of Risorgimento museums in fostering a conciliatory nationalization of all Risorgimental figures (and Garibaldi in particular), see Massimo Baioni, La ‘religione della patria’: Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale (1884–1918) (Treviso: Pagus, 1994). E. Gentile stresses the structuring role of these two logics in the institutionalization of fascist religion and ritual. The Sacralization, 69 and 89. Isnenghi, ‘Usi politici,’ 537. Calabrese, Garibaldi 108. According to Calabrese’s semiotic analysis of the

Notes to pages 76–8

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image-cult of Garibaldi, the worldly popularity of the general was the result of his literary and iconographic codification as the ‘Legendary Hero.’ This composite figure was in fact the result of a complex interaction among intentional factors and cultural conditions. Firstly, there was Garibaldi’s own selffashioning as a heroic man, modelled on literature (especially of Sir Walter Scott) which he had read and absorbed. Then, there was the literary production of the heroic figure in the historical novels and memoirs he wrote. At the same time, there was the development of the literary and iconographic representation of the ‘hero Garibaldi’ by famous writers and painters (Victor Hugo, George Sand, Alexandre Dumas, and Domenico Induno). Finally, all these figures were melded in the characterization of ‘hero-types’ in popular literature after his death (especially in Emilio Salgari’s novels). 13 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997) 45–56. 14 The relationship between Ezio Garibaldi and Mussolini remained strong throughout the 1930s. In 1935 Mussolini entrusted Ezio with the very delicate task of secret negotiations with British and French foreign ministers Sir Samuel Hoare and Pierre Laval to prevent their countries’ approval of economic sanctions against Italy in response to the military invasion of Ethiopia. In 1938, Ezio’s opposition to the Anti-Jewish Laws was punished by his expulsion from the PNF, but his personal friendship with Mussolini won him readmission to the party in late 1939. He rejoined the Italian army with the rank of colonel, and, during World War II, he was entrusted with the militarization of the so-called Garibaldian Corps (Legioni Garibaldine) and with the organization of an anti-French propaganda tool: the Azione Nizzarda. After 8 September 1943, however, rather than follow Mussolini to Salò, Ezio went south. He was captured in 1944 by the Allied forces and awaited the end of the war in the Padula prison camp near Naples. 15 On this artist, see the catalogue of the exhibition – Antonio Sciortino: Monuments and Public Sculpture (Malta: National Museum of Fine Arts, 2000). Maltese by birth, Sciortino was the director of the English Academy of Arts in Rome. Notwithstanding his foreign nationality, he was ‘un’artista di purissimo animo italiano’ (‘an artist with the purest type of Italian soul’) according to Ezio in an enthusiastic letter to Mussolini. This letter is preserved, together with the photographs of Sciortino’s plaster cast, in a folder entitled ‘Monumento Anita Garibaldi,’ in the combined archives of the SMSGG and the Federazione Nazionale Volontari Garibaldini (FNVG), Rome, Piazza della Repubblica 12, henceforth indicated as AFNVG. I wish to thank the president of the Istituto Internazionale Studi Giuseppe Garibaldi, Countess

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Notes to pages 78–82 Erika Garibaldi, and the president of the SMSGG, Dr Giuseppe Garibaldi, for giving me permission to conduct my research in the archive and for allowing me to publish the photographs that accompany this essay. Compare the photographs with Garibaldi’s narration: ‘Even my beloved Anita, twelve days after she had given birth, was forced to leave the camp with her infant in front of the saddle, to confront stormy weather. Riding a fiery horse, surrounded [by the enemy] she did not surrender ... but, spurring her horse, she passed with a vigorous rush right through the enemy’s fire and, though grazed by a bullet which pierced her hat and burned a lock of her hair, she was fortunately unharmed.’ Giuseppe Garibaldi, Memorie. 1872 (Bologna: Cappelli, 1932), 175–7. Mussolini had initially selected the design presented by Giuseppe Guastalla, a very traditional sculptor and a pupil of Ettore Ferrari, the nineteenth-century master and ‘Gran Maestro’ of the Italian Freemasonry. Unfortunately, no trace has survived of Guastalla’s plaster casts of Anita, and nothing in the correspondence among Guastalla, Ezio and Mussolini can clarify conclusively the reason for the latter’s change of heart. All we know is that Mussolini reversed his decision in late 1929 (possibly because of Guastalla’s association with the recently outlawed freemasonry) and assigned the commission to Mario Rutelli. Rutelli’s first plaster cast was seen and approved by Mussolini in December 1929. All documents referring to the building of Anita’s monument are in ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/7a. Alberto Riccoboni, Roma nell’arte (Rome: Mediterranea, 1942), 459. Nicoletta Cardano, ‘Per una storia dei monumenti celebrativi a Roma dalla prima guerra mondiale agli anni ‘30,’ in Roma Capitale: 1870–1970, Architettura e urbanistica, Uso e trasformazione della città storica, vol. 12 (Venice: Marsilio, 1984), 223. The news of at least one visit by Mussolini to Rutelli’s studio appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia on 4 April 1930. In a typewritten postwar memoir preserved at the AFNVG, Ezio speaks of several visits by Mussolini to Rutelli’s studio and mentions explicitly that it was Mussolini who ordered Rutelli to add baby Menotti on Anita’s left arm. Ezio Garibaldi, Memorie (n. d.), 23. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 24 (my emphasis). Antonietta Macciocchi, La Donna nera (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976); Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 41–76; and Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). On the left-side bas-relief Rutelli represented Anita leading a group of Garibaldians to battle at Coritibanos; on the right side, he sculpted Anita’s

Notes to pages 82–3

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desperate search for her husband on the battlefield. In both groups Anita was also characterized by the same representational signs exploited in the main statue: dress, flowing long hair, feminine riding posture, and the horse without reins. See my discussion of Alois Riegl’s definitions of historical, age, and newness values in Chapter 2. Many compositional elements in Sciortino’s Anita seem to have been directly inspired by three of Cambellotti’s most famous equestrian sculptures, L’Avo, Il Buttero, and Magister Equitum, all exhibited at the Second International Biannual of Decorative Arts, held in Monza in 1925. Sciortino did not participate in this exhibition but he certainly read the reviews – which reproduced and unanimously exalted Cambellotti’s sculptures – in Le Arti Decorative 8, 11, 12 (Milan 1925); Emporium 367, 369 (Rome 1925); and Le Belle Arti 10 (Turin 1925). The volume Cambellotti scultore (Rome: Appella and Quesada, 1991) reproduces the three works on pages 87, 94, and 96. Cambellotti’s influence on the modernist evolution of Sciortino’s art in the thirties is most noticeable in the latter’s best-known work, Speed (1937), shown in Figure 8 and currently exhibited in room 7a of the Maltese National Museum of Fine Arts in La Valletta. Gilles Deleuze has explored the intimate relationship between the modern experience of temporality afforded by film and the Bergsonian concept of duration. ‘Matter and Memory,’ writes Deleuze, in reference to Bergson’s major work, ‘was the diagnosis of a crisis in psychology. Movement, as physical reality in the external world, and the image, as psychic reality in consciousness, could no longer be opposed.’ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 57. Elaborating on Deleuze’s discussion of duration and cinema, Matt Matsuda describes Bergsonian memory as translating ‘both the intensities of spontaneous action and the timeless grandeur of the classical past into fleeting moments,’ a definition for which Sciortino’s Anita could serve as a fitting icon. Matt Matsuda, ‘The Body of the Philosopher: The Ethics of Memory, Mythology, and the Modern,’ Strategies 4/5 (1991): 134–50. In the European panorama of ‘invented traditions’ described by Eric Hobsbawm, the Garibaldian tradition constituted an anomalous case. In the first place its birth coincided with a private act: the political will left by the dying General Giuseppe Garibaldi. In this will he nominated his eldest son Menotti as military leader of his veterans and spiritual heir of his own brand of militant voluntarism. The general had been distinguished both by his support of peoples seeking freedom and independence and by his goal of conquering for the incomplete Italian state all the lands irredente (occupied by either

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Notes to pages 83–5 France or Austria). These included, first and foremost, Rome, but also his natal city of Nice, and the regions of Trentino and Venezia-Giulia. A description of how Menotti and his successor Ricciotti Sr interpreted this will would constitute a digression far too long for the dimensions of my study. The crucial point is that, in its original form, the Garibaldian tradition was not embodied in any specific ritual or institution. It thus rested on the private attribution of a genetic right to military leadership that made the content of this tradition – what Hobsbawm calls ‘the values and norms of behavior, which automatically implied continuity with the past’ – dependent on the political interpretation and public statements of the eldest family heir. See The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). This journal had been founded in 1903 by Ricciotti Sr and functioned as the official organ of Garibaldianism until it ceased publication during the war. In 1925, Ezio refinanced it and become its sole editor until 1939. In its heyday, between 1925 and 1928, Camicia Rossa attracted considerable public attention, thanks also to the regular contributions of Curzio Malaparte Suckert and several selvaggi, including Mino Maccari. Founded on the symbolic occasion of the second anniversary of the March on Rome (28 October 1924) the Federazione Nazionale Volontari Garibaldini (FNVG) opened its doors to all generations of Garibaldian veterans. More specifically, these included the few survivors who had fought with General Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1860, 1867, and 1871; those volunteers who had followed Ricciotti Sr and his sons in their military expeditions (the Balkans in 1897, Domokos in 1912, the Argonne in 1914); and the many more who had fought in the Brigata Cacciatori delle Alpi during the Great War. Ezio was elected chairman of the federation by the representatives of the pre-existing Garibaldian societies and entrusted with the right to act as its sole authorized representative in all contacts with the government. A public invitation to all Garibaldian veterans was issued, and by February 1925 approximately three thousand and six hundred veterans joined the FNVG, their number – just like Ezio’s symbolic capital – destined to decline steadily in the 1930s and to fall below eight hundred in 1939. Ezio Garibaldi, Fascismo garibaldino (Rome: Edizioni Camicia Rossa, 1928). Ciotti’s early opposition to fascism had been much more than symbolic. In 1926, he was arrested by the French police in connection with the Zanimboni attempt on Mussolini’s life. Expelled from France, he wandered for some time in the United States, England, and Cuba. However, on the occasion of the 1932 Garibaldian celebrations, he was pardoned by the fascist

Notes to pages 85–91

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regime and allowed to return to Italy to resume some publishing initiatives under the watchful eye of the OVRA. Mario Isnenghi, ‘Usi politici di Garabaldi,’ 540 and 541. Ezio Garibaldi to Mussolini, with Mussolini’s negative responses annotated in the margins, 19 May 1932, ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/9. Vito Labita, ‘Il milite ignoto: Dalle trincee all’Altare della Patria,’ in Gli occhi di Alessandro, ed. S. Bertelli and C. Grottanelli (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1990), 120–53. The SMSGG – whose members were absorbed by Ezio’s FNVG in 1924 – had not only been the proponent of the Unknown Soldier initiative, but was also the acknowledged guardian of this laic temple. The direct involvement of this organization in the performance of a national commemoration had become its major claim to distinction. Certainly Ezio could not have thought of a more fitting prototype of a successful ritual as he drafted his requests to Mussolini. Ezio Garibaldi to Mussolini, handwritten annotation in the right margin, 19 May 1932, ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/9. Here and in the following paragraph, I refer to the press accounts of the parade published by the main Genoese dailies Il Secolo XIX and Il Lavoro on 2 June 1932. As I will explain at length in the next chapter, I consider these press accounts to be precious decoders and recoders of fascist rhetorical strategies, rather than mere propaganda pieces. The term macchiaiolo refers to the impressionistic technique used by a group of painters who sought to portray – in addition to other more pastoral themes – both Italy’s Risorgimento and the more melancholic aftermath of independence and unification in the second half of the nineteenth century. Genova (June 1932): 657 (my emphasis). E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 33 and 80. As Carlo Ginzburg has recently argued, the conjunctural perspective of all microhistories addresses questions to ‘the comprehensive visions delineated by macrohistory.’ Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,’ Critical Inquiry 20, 1(1993): 27. All Roman newspapers published maps similar to the one reproduced in Figure 8, as well as detailed instructions for the formation of the parade. All invited groups were told to start marching in unison toward the point at which they were to join the parade; the funeral car followed by Mussolini and the Garibaldi family marked the beginning of the parade. Hence, functioning as the fulcrum of its spiralling movement, Mussolini’s presence – he joined the parade only between the station and Piazza Esedra – foregrounded the symbolic resonance of the parade’s synchronicity. The same

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newspaper articles also instructed the non-parading crowds to converge along the curbs of the Via Nazionale and along the route to the Gianicolo. According to most newspapers, no fewer than three hundred thousand people accompanied Anita to her burial site. 42 E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 27. 43 My phenomenological reading of the roll call performed at the end of the Roman parade seeks to highlight the ideological resonance of this ritual against its tout court identification as ‘the supreme rite of Fascism, the principal testimony of their religiosity,’ as stated by Emilio Gentile in The Sacralization of Politics, 27–8. According to Gentile, this ritual represented the symbolic essence of fascism as a political religion. In my view, however, Gentile does not take into account the rhetorical thrust of this ritual, which cannot be solely reduced to an emblematic form of fascist religiosity and must also be analysed in connection with the different spectacles within which it was inserted. 4. The Historic Imaginary and the Mass Media 1 ‘Eccellenza, non ho saputo resistere all’impeto che tutto mi pervade e mi spinge a dirle come io sia rimasto sbalordito nel leggere il suo discorso per Anita Garibaldi, in cui, parlando di cose note ed abusate, ha saputo essere genialmente nuovo e dire cose, e formulare giudizzi e trarre conclusioni di cui i piú autorevoli scrittori del Risorgimento non avevano sospettato neppure l’esistenza. Per il Duce e per la patria’ ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/7B, unmarked folder (my translation). 2 Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 117. 3 Of course, I cannot exclude with absolute certainty the possibility that some other scholar, consulting the same binder before me, might have misplaced Cotugno’s letter and put it in a folder all to itself. However, I did not, either during my research or in asking specific questions of several Italian historians and the senior staff of the ACS, find any evidence of this binder having been consulted by anyone before me. 4 ACS: PCM, 14.5.701/7B. This folder contains eight subfolders that include, among other documents, the map of the stands constructed for the inauguration and copies of all invitations to the ceremony sent by Mussolini. Unlike all the preceding commemorative events, the dispositions for this last act of the celebrations were rigidly imposed by Mussolini himself, without any official consultation or planning association with either Ezio’s FNVG or the PNF. 5 On 5 June Il Popolo d’Italia and all other Italian newspapers dedicated their

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front pages to the inauguration of Anita Garibaldi’s monument. In addition, the Stefani Agency sent the full text of Mussolini’s speech, a description of its significance, and a brief account of the ceremony to all provincial dailies whose journalists had not responded to invitations. In the actual event, Mussolini’s speech came not only after the unveiling of the monument, but also after brief speeches by Ezio Garibaldi and the governor of Rome. In the newspapers, the text of Mussolini’s speech was announced by a subtitle in bold-faced type and printed – sometimes in explicit isolation from the account of the actual ceremony – in a font different from those used both for the account and for the other two speeches included therein. My sample of forty-five front pages constitutes over two thirds of the estimated sixty-five Italian dailies in circulation in 1932. I have been able to retrieve this evidence thanks to Ezio Garibaldi’s painstaking collection of all original press clippings (sent to him by the private information agency L’Eco della Stampa) concerning the celebrations, which have been preserved in three bound albums in the AFNVG. I have not been able to determine how many provincial journalists actually attended the ceremony. As I describe later in this chapter, most newspapers published a revised version of an account of the inauguration ceremony distributed by the Stefani Agency. This would indicate that many did not, in fact, send representatives. However, not only were all Stefani texts partially modified, but all newspapers also published editorials that, in many cases, referred to the ceremony, thereby suggesting the presence of their authors at the event. Moreover, the lack of more original accounts of the ceremony offers no more proof of journalistic absence than it does of the success of the Stefani accounts in conveying what was actually a general consensus about the significant aspects of the event. In my interpretation, the available evidence seems to better support the latter hypothesis. According to the inventor of this concept, W.J.T. Mitchell, the imagetext is an analytic figure that can allow us to go beyond the strict dichotomy between linguistic and pictorial readings of images and texts. In Mitchell’s own words, the imagetext ‘reinscribes within the worlds of visual and verbal representation, the shifting relation of names and things, the sayable and the seeable, discourse about and experience of.’ W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 241. Following is the list of newspapers that published original accounts of the ceremony on 4 June: L’Ora, La Provincia di Padova, Roma, Le Ultime Notizie, Corriere del Tirreno, and Il Corriere di Napoli; on 5 June: La Stampa, Il Secolo XIX, Corriere della Sera, Il Resto del Carlino, Il Nuovo Giornale, Gazzetta del Popolo, Il

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Notes to pages 98–105 Popolo di Roma, Il Messaggero, and Il Giornale d’Italia; and on 6 June: Il Regime Fascista. These are the twenty-five newspapers that published Stefani ‘text 1.’ On 4 June: Corriere Mercantile, and Stampa Sera; on 5 June: Gazzetta di Venezia, La Gazzetta, Il Piccolo, La Provincia di Como, L’Italia, Il Nuovo Cittadino, La Cronaca Prealpina, L’Isola, Il Popolo, Il Popolo Toscano, Adriatico, La Selce Fascista, La Voce del Mattino, L’Avvenire d’Italia, L’Arena, Il Lavoro, La Voce de Mantova, La Vedetta d’Italia, and Corriere Emiliano; and on 6 June: Il Popolo del Friuli, Corriere Padano, Il Popolo di Sicilia, and La Vedetta Fascista. Finally, here are the four newspapers that published Stefani ‘text 2.’ On 5 June: Il Brennero, Il Popolo di Brescia, La Sera; and on 6 June: L’Ambrosiano. Henceforth in the text I refer to the first Stefani account as ‘text 1,’ and to the second as ‘text 2.’ This concluding image of Mussolini’s speech abruptly returned to that popular association of Garibaldi and anticlericalism that he had carefully repressed in all commemorative events, but it also contained a powerful selfreferential appeal for all newspaper journalists and editors. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Mussolini had also used a parallel image in his 14 May 1929 speech to justify his decision to build a monument to Garibaldi’s first wife. Without exception, all newspapers on 15 May 1929 had highlighted in their titles Mussolini’s defense of Garibaldi’s monument rather than the related announcement. For journalists, listeners, and newspaper readers alike, this closing image may have thus immediately recalled the earlier speech in which the Duce had held the revolutionary ground against the Vatican rather than Garibaldi’s anticlericalism. Henceforth I will italicize the word signifier whenever I refer to Mussolini as giver of meaning. Two other newspapers – L’Ora and Il Corriere del Tirreno – published photographs of Rutelli’s Anita on 4 June. However, these pictures were not of the monument itself but of the plaster cast without baby Menotti. From left to right the figures are: the sculptor Mario Rutelli, the Governor of Rome Prince Ludovisi, and PNF Secretary Achille Starace. All these film sources – except for the silent documentary – are retrievable and available for viewing at the LUCE Archive in Rome, Italy. They are listed in the LUCE catalogue of newsreels and documentaries as follows: The removal of Anita Garibaldi’s body from Genoa (no. 969), Anita’s ashes from Genoa to Rome (no. 96), The unveiling of the monument to Anita Garibaldi (no. 98), The transferral of Anita’s body from Genoa to Rome (no. 1339), and The inauguration of Anita’s monument on the Gianicolo (no. 9030). The following is the length of each newsreel and documentary: The removal of Anita Garibaldi’s body from Genoa – 53 metres, Anita’s ashes from Genoa to Rome – 106 metres, The unveiling of the monument to Anita Garibaldi – 95 metres, The

Notes to page 105

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transferral of Anita’s body from Genoa to Rome – 450 metres, and The inauguration of Anita’s monument on the Gianicolo – 196 metres. I call the editing of this footage ‘excessive’ in comparison to both the average length of newsreels and documentaries produced by LUCE in the same period and to the unprecedented number of final products produced and distributed. 17 According to the most authoritative studies, the volume of the production and distribution of LUCE newsreels and documentaries by 1932 had approximated Mussolini’s intention to make LUCE ‘l’arma più potente’ (the most powerful weapon) of the fascist state. Established at the end of 1924, LUCE had, within a year, been made directly answerable to the government, and its production had been placed under the personal supervision of Mussolini. According to the data published by this state-controlled institution in 1930, LUCE was already capable of producing over 200 newsreels per year, which it issued in runs of over 3,500 copies. Although the number of foreign segments bought from MGM and Gaumont initially outweighed those actually filmed by LUCE, the absolute numbers and relative percentage of LUCE’s production grew exponentially between 1926 and 1929. During the same period, the average length of each newsreel increased from under 150 metres to over 300. Finally, from 1928 onwards, LUCE started producing documentaries and newsreels collections (Riviste LUCE) to be screened at an ever-greater number of movie theatres as well as locations adapted specially for this use, such as the celebrated Planetarium in Rome (which had 55,000 visitors in 1929). In terms of distribution, the effort was no less impressive. From 1926 onwards, every one of Italy’s over 2,500 movie theaters was obliged to rent and show one LUCE newsreel per week. In 1929, the number of venues, including theatres, schools, churches, and other places where films were shown, had risen to 3,225. From 1927 onwards, 25 travelling theatres’ were equipped to distribute LUCE products in the towns, villages, and country places where no screening equipment was otherwise available. In 1929, an estimated 130,000,000 viewers had attended a yearly total of 1,200,000 screenings. See Mino Argentieri, L’Occhio del regime: Informazione e propaganda nel cinema del fascismo (Florence: Vallecchi, 1979), 17–70; and Elaine Mancini, ‘LUCE: Pedagogy and Propaganda in Documentaries and Newsreels,’ in Struggles of the Italian Film Industry during Fascism, 1930–1935 (Michigan: University of Michigan Research Press, 1981), 121–60. 18 By the end of 1931, the advent of sound film obliged LUCE to acquire new filming equipment, while movie theatres had to be equipped with new speakers and projectors. Although the theatres could not make the conversion as quickly as LUCE, by 1932 over a thousand movie theatres had acquired sound equipment, and by the end of the same year, LUCE had already pro-

240

19

20

21 22 23 24

Notes to pages 105–7 duced 141 sound newsreels (in addition to 136 silent ones). See Argentieri, L’Occhio del regime, 35–7; and Elaine Mancini, ‘LUCE: Pedagogy and Propaganda,’ 142–5. Between 1929 and 1934, the Italian daily press underwent a radical phase of aesthetic modernization in response to the contemporaneous transformation of traditional weeklies into formidable rivals, and to the birth of rotocalchi (illustrated magazines). The rate of modernization varied greatly among individual dailies, and most local newspapers remained bound to the contents of Stefani accounts. Yet sooner or later, competition with the visual appeal of weeklies – e.g., La Domenica del Corriere, printing 600,000 copies per week – and rotocalchi forced most newspapers to abandon their traditional layout and typography. Around 1932, horizontal titling, the insertion of photographs, and greater variations in typeface became the signs of a modernized encoding of reality in the daily press. See Paolo Murialdi, La Stampa del regime fascista (Rome: Laterza, 1986), 79–110. For example, for the future minister of popular culture, Dino Alfieri, the LUCE newsreels were none other than an arid photographic reckoning of events; the documentaries were never treated with the necessary directing mastery and the sound was most often substituted by the sonorizzato (added sound tracks). For LUCE director Luigi Freddi, the effect of the newsreels was greatly impaired by ‘delays that deprived propaganda of its suggestive power, and often dissatisfied their audience.’ Finally, Mussolini himself – who considered the previewing and censoring of all newsreels as a weekly duty of the utmost importance – found them generally ‘monotonous and inadequate.’ Cited in Giampaolo Bernagozzi, Il mito dell’immagine (Bologna: Clueb, 1983), 18 and 14. On controls over newsreel production, see also Philip V. Cannistraro, La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media (Bari: Laterza, 1975), 312–15. James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 201–32. Ibid., 207–8 (my emphasis). Ibid., 208. The Genoese event was reproduced only in a silent version, as the third segment of newsreel no. 969. However, sound footage of this event was certainly shot and available, because a few metres of it appear at the beginning of the segment of the sound newsreel treating the Roman entombment of Anita (no. 96). Both the Roman parade and the monument’s inauguration were shot in silent and sound versions, but the editing of both versions differed radically from that of the Genoese parade’s footage. No silent newsreels were made of the Roman events of 2 June (the Genoese parade) and 4 June (the

Notes to pages 107–9

241

inauguration ceremony). Instead, the silent footage of the entombment and some footage of the monument’s inauguration were added to the newsreel footage of the Genoese parade, and they were edited together in an unusually long silent documentary. The length of this documentary is 450 metres, versus an average of 150 for this type of documentary. By contrast, the sound footage of both the Roman parade and the inauguration ceremony was edited into two separate newsreel segments (newsreels nos. 96 and 98). Finally, footage constituting a much longer version of the inauguration ceremony was edited into a sound documentary that was shown throughout the month of July in the Roman Planetarium; it was also distributed to LUCE travelling theaters. 25 Luckily the LUCE catalogue of documentaries reports not only the titles of its entries, but also the actual film captions of all their segments. In my case – and only for the purposes of this analysis of referential editing – it has thus been sufficient to check all of the written captions of the newsreel segments in order to reconstruct which of their sequences were edited in this documentary. 26 Massimo Cardillo, Il duce in moviola: Politica e divismo nei cinegiornali e documentari ’Luce’ (Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 1983). 27 It might be worth pausing to note the significance of the editing ratio of these two sequences by comparing the sound documentary and its referential double: newsreel segment no. 98. In fact, these two constitute the only example in the whole corpus of film sources related to this event of a double narrative encoding of the same event in the same medium, sound film. Their length primarily differentiated the two features: 105 metres for the sound newsreel segment; 196 metres for the sound documentary. Both include excerpts referring to the monument’s unveiling and to Mussolini’s speech. However, the editing ratio of the sequences referring to the two events is exactly the same in both newsreel and documentary: 3 to 1 in favour of Mussolini’s speech (78 vs. 26 metres in the newsreel, and 147 vs. 49 metres in the documentary). Naturally, the greater length accorded by both to Mussolini’s image/words is not at all surprising. Indeed, as unanimously argued by all scholars of LUCE newsreels, the birth of sound film especially delighted Mussolini because it finally allowed the rhetorical fusion of gestures and oratory, both of which had been widely but separately reproduced through film and radio. Yet the equal editing ratio of newsreel segment no. 98 and documentary no. 9030 could not be less coincidental and more significant. In fact, while the documentary reproduced the entire speech, the newsreel showed only some of it. Clearly, had it been Mussolini’s intention to be the sole and absolute Divo of the newsreel, he could have easily had the entire

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Notes to pages 109–16

speech reproduced. Instead, the identical editing ratios call our attention to the rhetorical value of the ratio itself. Quite plausibly, though probably unconsciously, the LUCE editor of both newsreel and documentary identified this ratio as a quantitative tool for laying visual stress on Mussolini’s speech against the background of the monument’s unveiling. 28 The following analysis of this documentary relies on a combination of so-called point of view theory and film narratology. For a good introductory study of point of view theories and their connection to narratology, see New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond, ed. R. Stam, R. Burgoyne, and S. Flitterman-Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992), 69–118. 29 This closing image matches Benjamin’s most famous description of the ‘aura’ as that which we can all breathe in ‘if, while resting on a summer afternoon, [we] follow with [our] eyes a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch which casts its shadow over [us].’ Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hanna Arendt (New York: Schoken Books, 1968), 222–3. 30 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario: Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939 (Bari: Laterza, 1991), 116. 5. The Contest of Exhibitions 1 The ‘Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome’ was set up in the Roman Palazzo dei musei (Palace of museums) between 7 January and 24 April 1932; the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution opened at the Palazzo delle esposizioni on 29 October 1932. 2 Carlo Galassi Paluzzi, ‘Il contributo dell’Istituto di Studi Romani alla miglior conoscenza di Roma nell’ottocento e di taluni aspetti del Risorgimento in Roma,’ Roma 9 (September 1935): 406. 3 Ibid., 405. 4 Ibid. (my emphasis). 5 The article reproduces a speech delivered by Galassi Paluzzi at the XXII Congresso del Reale Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, held in Bologna, 11–14 September 1935. 6 Galassi Paluzzi, ‘Il contributo,’ 405. 7 Letter from Galassi Paluzzi to Guido Beer, (n.d.) Archivio centrale di stato (ACS): Presidenza Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM), 1931–3, Mostra di Roma nell’ottocento, f. 14.1.2391/1. 8 Predictably, Camicia Rossa immediately focused its polemical eye on the intentions of the organizers, maintaining that Galassi Paluzzi had proposed not exhibiting ‘documents referring to the events of 1849 and 1870 ... so as

Notes to pages 116–19

9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16 17

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not to disrupt the present concordant atmosphere with an exaltation of those events.’ Galassi Paluzzi answered the accusations by admitting the conciliatory intentions but disclaiming any plan to exclude relevant historical documents from the exhibition. Camicia Rossa (30 November 1930): 262, and (15 December 1930): 285. Stephen Bann, ‘Poetics of the Museum: Lenoir and Du Sommerard,’ in The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 84–8. Ibid., 90. The very first pieces on exhibit in rooms three, four, and five were plasters belonging to the demolished palace. Portraits of prestigious family members were displayed in the following rooms. Finally, three engravings of the palace itself (items 160, 165, and 166) were displayed in room eleven, and a photograph (item 24) in room fifteen. The matching of the reconstruction rooms with representational items on display in the MRO has been possible because they are all currently exhibited in the Roman Museo del folklore e della poesia romanesca. This fortunate circumstance is the result of the fact that the Italian state bought the private archive (which is now deposited at the Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele II) and the art collection (currently on display in the above mentioned museum) of the main curator-exhibitor of the MRO, Franco Ceccarelli (alias Ceccarius), after his death on 1974. Ceccarelli had also been responsible for the realization of the historical reconstructions of popular scenes. See Ceccarius, ‘Come sarà la Mostra dell’ottocento,’ Il Piccolo (19 November 1931). I wish to thank Luigi Ceccarelli, Ceccarius’ son, for his valuable assistance at every step of my research on the MRO. Ibid., 85. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 201. Ibid., 202. Ibid., 192–245. Although less radical in tone, the reviews of Eugenio Giovannetti, Il Giornale d’Italia (9 March 1932); Rodolfo De Mattei, Il Tevere (26 January 1932); Gian Andrea Andriulli, Il Resto del Carlino (16 March 1932); and Michele Biancale, Il Popolo di Roma (1 February 1932) all criticized the exhibition for the overabundance of things to remember. Even a traditional critic such as Francesco Sapori, reviewing the exhibition in Il Popolo d’Italia on 24 February 1932 explicitly cited Bardi and partially agreed with his judgment. As for the Ordine fascista, it is not without significance that, in 1925, Mussolini himself recognized this polemical periodical as the first truly fascist review.

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Notes to pages 119–28

18 Ibid., 227. 19 Ibid. 20 On Bardi’s critical influence see Francesco Tentori, P.M. Bardi (Milan: Mazzotta, 1990). 21 Pietro Maria Bardi, ‘Mostra dell’ottocento romano vista da novecentista,’ L’Ambrosiano (14 January 1932). 22 Laudatory remarks on the organizers’ work, and positive reviews of the exhibition, appeared in: Corriere della Sera (1 and 7 January 1932); Emporium (February 1932); Gazzetta del Popolo (3 January 1932); Illustrazione Italiana (31 January 1932); Italia (5 January and 6 February 1932); Italia Letteraria (17 January 1932); Italia Vivente (19 January 1932); Lavoro (10 January 1932); Lavoro Fascista (5 and 6 January 1932); Il Messaggero (1 and 15 January 1932); Osservatore Romano (2 and 29 January 1932); Il Piccolo (2 and 7 January 1932); Il Popolo di Roma (1 January 1932); Il Resto del Carlino (3 January 1932); Secolo XX (1 January 1932); La Stampa (3 January 1932); Il Tevere (4 January 1932); La Tribuna (3 January 1932); Tribuna Illustrata (21 February 1932); and Vita Femminile (January 1932). In particular, see Ceccarius, ‘La Mostra dell’ottocento romano,’ Nuova Antologia (16 January 1932): 4; and Diego Angeli, ‘Mostra di Roma nell’Ottocento,’ Il Marzocco (1 January 1932). 23 A guided tour to the Garibaldian exhibition was included in the program of the twelth national congress of Risorgimento historians held in Rome in May 1932. 24 Mostra garibaldina: Catalogo (Rome: Grafia, 1932), 10. 25 Monti, ‘La Mostra garibaldina a Roma,’ Corriere della Sera (30 April 1932). 26 These and all other exhibition photographs reprinted here can be found in the archive of the Garibaldian federation (AFNVG). Once again, I wish to thank both Mrs. Erika Garibaldi and Mr. Giuseppe Garibaldi for allowing me to reproduce these crucial photographs. 27 Hayden White, ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,’ in The Content of the Form (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 58–82. 28 Monti, ‘La Mostra.’ 29 The absence of a description of the gallery in the exhibition’s guide was likely intended to augment the gallery’s surprise effect on the visitor. 30 In his order to the Pighi furnishing company, Monti describes the mannequins as being of the ‘Monti model.’ AFNVG: ‘Mostra garibaldina - Cinquantenario,’ III/15a. 31 Monti considered that ‘the rooms of the Palazzo lent themselves to any modification and adaptation required by the nature of any kind of exhibition.’ Monti, ‘La Mostra.’

Notes to pages 129–32

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32 White, ‘The Politics of Historical Interpretation,’ 62–7. 33 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Resonance and Wonder,’ in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Levine (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991). For a related discussion of the relationship between the emblem as a poetic form and the sublime, see Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially Chapter 4. 34 Replacing the categories of space and time with those of enàrgeia and narrative, we could liken Monti’s curatorial strategy in the MG to the ‘sublime dialectic’ in William Blake’s poetry as defined by W.J.T. Mitchell: ‘Blake’s strategy, I would suggest, was to transform the dualism into dialectic, to create unity out of contrariety rather than similitude or complementary-ness. Blake wanted to combine spatial and temporal form in his illuminated books not to produce a fuller imitation of the total objective world, but to dramatize the interaction of the apparent dualities of our experience of the world and to embody the strivings of those dualities for unification.’ W.J.T. Mitchell, Blake’s Composite Art: A Study of the Illuminated Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 35. 35 Only the review published by Il Secolo XX on 3 June 1932 noted and disapproved of the insertion of the reconstructed uniforms. 36 Monti, ‘La Mostra.’ 37 Mostra garibaldina: Guida (Rome: Grafia, 1932), 1. 38 Renato Pacini, ‘La Mostra di Roma nell’ottocento,’ Emporium (February 1932): 331 39 Ibid. 40 Mattia, ‘Verso la chiusura della Mostra garibaldina,’ L’Impero (10 June 1932). 41 The first two quotations are from La Tribuna of 30 April, the following ones from L’Impero of 15 May and 10 June. 42 Pier Maria Bardi, ‘La Mostra garibaldina ch’è stata inaugurata dal Duce,’ Gioventù Fascista 13 (10 May 1932): 3–4. Positive reviews that highlighted the last three sections of the exhibition and their mass appeal were also published by Giuseppe Andriulli in Il Messaggero, 9 April 1932; Adolfo Colombo in Torino (May 1932): 89–90; anonymous in Il Popolo d’Italia (30 April 1932); Silvino Mezza in Il Popolo di Roma (1 May 1932); Rodolfo De Mattei in Il Tevere (29 April and 10 June 1932); and Maffio Maffii in Il Marzocco (8 May 1932). 43 Bardi, ‘La Mostra garibaldina,’ 4. 44 P.M. Bardi, ‘Nuove esigenze delle esposizioni,’ Ambrosiano (20 March 1931). 45 Ibid. 46 P.M. Bardi, ‘Gli artisti e la Mostra del fascismo,’ Ambrosiano (13 July 1932). An earlier, very similar version had been published by Gioventù Fascista on 15 May 1932.

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Notes to pages 133–5

47 Margherita Sarfatti, ‘Architettura, arte e simbolo alla Mostra del fascismo,’ Architettura (January 1933): 2. 48 The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution has been the main focus of an unpublished dissertation, several articles, and quite a few recent monographs on fascist mass culture. See Libero Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ (PhD diss., Massachussets Institute of Technology, 1989); Giorgio Ciucci, ‘L’autorappresentazione del fascismo: La Mostra del decennale della marcia su Roma,’ Rassegna di Architettura (4 June 1982): 48–55; Gigliola Fioravanti, ed., Archivio centrale dello stato: Partito nazionale fascista – Modella rivoluzione fascista, Pubblicazioni degli Archivi di Stato – Strumenti CIX (Rome: 1990); Fabio Benzi, Mario Sironi: Il mito dell’architettura (Milan: 1990); Diane Ghirardo ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy,’Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) 45 (February 1992): 67–75; Libero Andreotti, ‘The Aesthetics of War: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,’ JAE 45 (February 1992): 76–86; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Fascism’s Museum in Motion,’ JAE 45 (February 1992): 87–98; Brian McLaren, ‘Under the Sign of Reproduction,’ JAE 45 (February 1992): 98–106; Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 1–37; Marla Stone, ‘Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,’ Journal of Contemporary History 28 (April 1993): 215–43; Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 102–13; M. Stone, The Patron State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially 132–57. Most of these scholars (in particular Andreotti, Gentile, Schnapp, and Stone) have explicitly quoted and commented on Sarfatti’s authoritative definition of the MRF. 49 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Ekphrasis and Quotations,’ Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 20 (March 1988): 11. 50 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations,’ 8–10. 51 Ibid., 9. 52 ACS: Carte Alfieri, f. 9. The handwritten comments are on the margins of page 1 and 2 of the exhibition’s plan contained in this folder. 53 Monti was also the only historian-curator invited to collaborate. 54 Although Monti did not have an official title in the MRF’s organization, his effective participation in all major decisions taken by Alfieri and Freddi is amply demonstrated by the analysis that follows. Indirect confirmation of Monti’s special status can be also inferred from the fact that his was the only

Notes to pages 135–8

55

56

57 58 59

60

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collaborator’s name explicitly mentioned by Freddi in the Traccia. Furthermore, Alfieri’s trust in Monti as his ‘man on the job’ is evident in a letter addressed by Alfieri to Professor Alberto Lumbroso on 29 August 1932. In response to some ‘historical’ suggestions made by this scholar concerning the arrangement of the documents he had sent to the MRF, Alfieri angrily replied: ‘Concerning the criteria related to the documentary arrangement of the “war section,” I may tell you that we are not trying to ‘reconstruct’ the whole period 1915–1918, with its glories, its sacrifices, and the poetry of the entire period. We are only interested in the reconstruction of Mussolini’s thought, hence, of fascism between the fight for intervention and the victory in the war. Therefore, only Monti can judge the appropriate proportion of elements necessary to trace the fascist direction amidst the immense material related to the war. It must be remembered that we are not mounting an exhibition of the war, but of the Fascist Revolution’ (ACS: ACSCF, tit. XVII, no. 10, vol. 1, no. 554, ‘Barone Lumbroso’). All major artistic movements were present in the MRF: the futurists were represented by Enrico Prampolini, Gerardo Dottori, and Antonio Santagata; the rationalists by the architects Giuseppe Terragni, Adalberto Libera, Guido De Renzi, and Antonio Valente; the Novecento group by Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Esodo Pratelli, and Marcello Nizzoli; and the Strapaese faction by Mino Maccari, Amerigo Bartoli, and Leo Longanesi. The remaining artists may be loosely associated with Novecento aesthetics. The ten historiographers involved were Enrico Arrigotti, Giovanni Capodivacca, Dante Dini, Luigi Freddi, Riccardo Gigante, Leo Longanesi, Gigi Maino, Alessandro Melchiori, Antonio Monti, and Francesco Sacco. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations,’ 13. Ibid., 25. The last four rooms were entrusted solely to the artistry of Mario Sironi (who did R and S), Leo Longanesi (who worked on T), and the architects Adalberto Libera and Antonio Valente (responsible for U). Luigi Freddi, Traccia storico-politica della mostra del fascismo (Rome: n.d.) I have recovered the complete typewritten proofs of this crucial document in the Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome. The document bears only Freddi’s name, but it relies so deeply on Monti’s preparatory work on Il Popolo d’Italia that it leaves no doubt concerning the latter’s collaboration in its drafting. (Monti is also the only collaborator explicitly named by Freddi in the text.) Unfortunately, I have not been able to trace the final printed version in either of the national libraries (Florence and Rome), or in private ones. However, according to the exhibition catalogue, the published edition of this outline came to about 120 pages, which is approximately the

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61

62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

Notes to pages 138–43 number of pages (112) contained in the proofs I have found. Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 59. The outline indicated the following plan: (1) Rooms A and B, ‘From Sarajevo to the Italian intervention,’ June 1914–May 1915; (2) Rooms C and D, ‘The war,’ May 1915–November 1918; (3) Room F, ‘From the armistice to the foundation of the fasces,’ November 1918–March 1919; (4) Room G, ‘The year 1919’; (5) Rooms H and I, ‘The year 1920’; (6) Rooms L and M, ‘Fiume and Dalmatia, from the Roman Pact to the Neptune Agreements’; (7) Room N, ‘The year 1921’; (8) Room O, ‘The year 1922 up to the Naples Gathering’; (9) Rooms P and Q, ‘The March on Rome.’ Luigi Freddi, Traccia storico-politica della mostra del fascismo, 3. His request was not only satisfied but exceeded: one lab was furnished with four manophot electrical machines for the reproduction of 5,140 badly damaged documents; another one was occupied by LUCE technicians who attended to the printing of 3,127 photographic reproductions, 2,170 square metres of metre-plus sized enlargements, 1,030 photographs of a format between 50 x 65 cm. and one square metre, and more than 8,000 photographs between 13 x 18 and 24 x 30 cm. Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 63. Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 81. Antonio Monti, ‘La Mostra della rivoluzione fascista: Un sacrario del tempo di guerra,’ Corriere della Sera (28 June 1932). Room C: Funi’s Trofeo di guerra futurista (Futurist war trophy), Rambelli’s Il Re soldato (The soldier king), Marini’s L’Italia armata (Italy armed), and two wooden silhouettes of Mussolini and Garibaldi; Room D: Rambelli’s Il fante che canta (The singing infantryman). Freddi, Traccia, 97. In Italian, the word tempo may mean ‘time’ in general (il tempo), or a specific ‘time period’ (al tempo di...), or a theatrical musical ‘act’ (primo tempo). Letter from Alfieri to Morello, federal secretary of Agrigento, 12 March 1932; ACS: ACSCF, tit. XVII, no. 10, vol. 1, no. 224, ‘Agrigento.’ Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 177. On the fascist teatro di masse see Jeffrey Schnapp, 18 BL (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 130. The following discussion of this room is largely based on Chapter 6 of Andreotti’s dissertation, 129–45. As the catalogue indicates, the underlined sentence in Mussolini’s letter is the Carduccian verse ‘with blood the wheel is set in motion,’ allegorically represented in the photomontage that frames it. Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 188. Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 152.

Notes to pages 150–60

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75 On Sironi see Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 76 Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 192; Pica, Mario Sironi (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1962), 17. 77 Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 152. 78 Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations,’ 28. 79 Ibid. 80 The interpretation of the MRF as a ‘Sironian exhibition’ has been most forcefully made by Andreotti on the basis of the testimony of Sironi’s companion, Mimi Costa. Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 476. This Sironian imprint has also been also highlighted by E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 108–10; Stone, The Patron State, 150; and Braun, Mario Sironi, 132–57. 81 Freddi, Traccia, 26 and 93. 82 Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 214. 83 This harsh judgment was expressed by Bardi in a typewritten review of the exhibition which he never published, but which survives in his private archive. Photocopies of roughly three quarters of this archive are held in the ACS: Archivio Bardi, b. 6/119; the document is no. 2212, and it is entitled ‘Artisti.’ 84 In particular, Andreotti, Gentile, and Stone. 85 Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 171. 86 Schnapp, ‘Epic Demontrations,’ 28. 87 Contrary to Andreotti’s supposition of a conflict between the documentarist Alfieri and the creative genius Sironi (a supposition revealed also in his consistent marginalization of the ‘documentarist’ triumvirate), all circumstantial evidence points to a direct and close collaboration among Alfieri, Monti, and Sironi. Quite simply, Alfieri’s and Monti’s paradigmatic focus on utilizing Il Popolo d’Italia as the exhibition’s historic agent would never have found a more natural and passionate supporter and ally than Sironi. Sironi had been not only the newspaper’s most prestigious political illustrator since 1921, but also the artistic designer (in collaboration with Giovanni Muzio) of an Il Popolo d’Italia exhibition mounted for the 1928 Milanese Fair. It was in this very first curatorial venture that Sironi had met his older colleague, Antonio Monti. Monti, in fact, was Sironi’s historical collaborator on the Il Popolo d’Italia Pavilion, and also the sole curator of the Risorgimento Press Pavilion. To top this impressive series of fortunate coincidences, we find Alfieri personally involved in both exhibitions. As president of the Fascist Cultural Institute of Milan, he had certainly been directly involved with the choices of Sironi, Muzio, and Monti as curators of the Il Popolo d’Italia Pavilion. As a regular contributor to the Corriere della Sera, he wrote a very positive

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89 90 91

92

93

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Notes to pages 160–5 review of Monti’s Risorgimental Pavilion. Significantly, a copy of this review is in the archival folder containing Alfieri’s 1928 project for the Mostra del fascismo. Since the article is not dated, Andreotti has mistakenly assumed that this review was of a 1927 ‘exhibition of the Risorgimento.’ ACS: Carte Alfieri, b. 9; cf. Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 44. While the first set of studies presented a gallery that included several figurative elements and was completely unlike the final product, the later ones were ‘studies of light’ and variations on the theme of the gallery as it was built. The radical difference between the two sets of drawings indicates that Sironi might have resolved his representational problems with this narrow rectangular space by looking for inspiration to Monti’s solution to the same problem in his Gallery of Uniforms. A visual clue to this connection comes from the uniformity and stylized anthropomorphism of the room’s pilasters, which resemble the gesture of the Roman salute. The sketches are reproduced in Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 173–4. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations,’ 29. Alfieri-Freddi, Mostra, 112. Ernst Gombrich, ‘Style,’ International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 15 (New York: Macmillan and The Free Press, 1968), 283. I owe to Carlo Ginzburg the valuable suggestion of looking into the connections between fascism and the ‘normative’ conception of style. See Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle : The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). Futurism pivoted both its destruction of poetic syntax and its reconstruction of the universe on the replacement of synthesis by analogy, and, more precisely, on the substitution of all adjectives and adverbs with ‘double nouns’ (i.e. ‘man-torpedo,’ ‘woman-boat’) precisely because the former ‘constituted the multicolored festoons, the trompe l’oeil swags, pedestals, parapets, and balustrades of the old traditional styles.’ F.T. Marinetti, Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), now in Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings, F.T. Marinetti, ed. R.W. Flint (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Classics, 1991), 92–3. Benito Mussolini, Scritti e discorsi, vol. 2 (Milan: Hoelpi, 1934–1939), 335, cited in Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 26. 6. Fascist Historic Culture

1 ‘Che tutti i musei storici, ed in particolare tutti i musei del Risorgimento abbiano urgente bisogno di essere aggiornati e modernizzati, e, soprattutto, che si debba ancora molto lavorare per infondere vita in tante memorie del

Notes to pages 165–8

2 3

4

5

6 7 8 9 10 11

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passato, non è più una novità per nessuno. La possibilità e la necessità di fare tutto ciò è esattamente quello che la Mostra della rivoluzione fascista ha dimostrato.’ Antonio Monti, ‘La Mostra della rivoluzione e i musei storici’ in Atti del Terzo Congresso degli Istituti Fascisti Cultura (Rome: PNF, 1933), 19 (my translation). An unabridged version of this talk had already appeared in the April 1933 issue of Ezio Garibaldi’s Camicia Rossa, under the title ‘La Mostra della rivoluzione fascista e il riordino dei Musei del risorgimento.’ Finally, Monti republished this talk in modified form as ‘A proposito di “mostre” e di “musei del risorgimento,”’ Rassegna Storica del Risorgimento 21, no. 3 (May–June 1934): 626–9. ‘In dieci anni l’Europa sarà fascista o fascistizzata’ ‘Il Duce inaugura la Mostra della rivoluzione,’ Il Popolo d’Italia, 30 October 1932 (my translation). Three recent studies of fascist culture have dedicated ample space to the analysis of the exhibition and its impact: Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 102–32; Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Politics of Culture in Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 101–41; and Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 128–76 and 222–53. Italian fascism, of course, did not invent the decade as a unit of periodization. Already in the 19th century Russian intellectuals referred to their distinct and successive generations in terms of decades (‘the men of the 1820s,’ ‘…of the ’40s’ etc.), and American media would refer to the ‘roaring ’20s’ even before that decade was over. Yet the fascist decade was unique in so far as it was neither retroactive nor generational, but represented instead a stylization of time projected toward the future. On both qualitative and quantitative responses to the MRF, see Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1992), 17–24. Libero Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution’ (PhD diss., Massachussetts Institute of Technology, 1989), 156. Schnapp, ‘Epic Demonstrations,’ 23. Diane Ghirardo, ‘Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy,’ Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) 45 (February 1992): 70. Stone, The Patron State, 222. Antonio Monti, ‘Documenti per la storia del fascismo: La Mostra del fascismo,’ Corriere della Sera (30 April 1932). Emilio Pifferi, ‘Mostra della rivoluzione,’ Casabella (April 1933): 38–41 (my emphasis).

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Notes to pages 168–74

12 Ugo D’Andrea, ‘La Mostra della rivoluzione,’ Giornale d’Italia (19 October 1932). 13 Francesco Sapori, ‘Epopea,’ Il Popolo d’Italia (16 December 1932). 14 The comment referred explicitely to Monti’s war room. Paolo Orano, ‘Il verbo che si è fatto carne,’ Corriere della Sera (2 May 1933). 15 Libero Andreotti, ‘The Aesthetics of War: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,’ JAE 45 (February 1992): 76–86; Berezin, Making the Fascist Self, 109–12; E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 102–32. 16 E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 104. 17 Ibid., 127. 18 Ibid., 107. 19 Among the scholars who have produced detailed studies of the MRF, only Jeffrey Schnapp acknowledges the ‘excessive’ quality of both the event and its reception. Anticipating some crucial aspects of this analysis of the MRF’s impact on fascist mass culture and imaginary, Schnapp has rightly connected the MRF to the ‘overproduction of signs’ typical of fascist image politics and the ‘participatory enthusiasm’ – as opposed to mere consensus – they aimed at fostering. 20 Cited in Andreotti, ‘Art and Politics in Italy,’ 217. 21 Atti del Terzo Congresso, 20. 22 Alfieri’s discussion of Monti’s proposal is printed on pages 112 to 116 of the Atti del Terzo Congresso. 23 The embarrassed and perplexed response of the audience to the MontiAlfieri debate is recorded repeatedly (in italics and in parentheses) in the text of the Atti del Terzo Congresso, 112, 114, and 116. 24 Atti del Terzo Congresso, 25. 25 On De Vecchi in general, and on his ‘fascist reclaiming of history’ in particular, see Massimo Baioni, ‘Fascismo e risorgimento: L’Istituto per la storia del risorgimento italiano,’ Passato e presente 41 (May–June 1997): 45–76. 26 De Vecchi to Mussolini, 26 November 1929. Copies of this and other correspondence regarding the erection of the monument to Anita and the Garibaldian celebrations as a whole can be found in a folder denominated ‘Monumento Anita Garibaldi: 1929–1932’ in De Vecchi’s personal archive, organized and preserved by his grandson Paolo De Vecchi in Rome, Italy. I wish to thank Mr. De Vecchi for letting me consult the entire archive and for all his precious assistance in the endeavor. 27 Luciano Romersa, Il quadriumviro scomodo: Il vero Mussolini nelle memorie del più monarchico dei fascisti (Milan: Mursia, 1983), 132. 28 De Vecchi, ‘La bonifica fascista della storia,’ in La bonifica fascista della cultura (Milan: Mondadori, 1937), 132–7.

Notes to pages 174–80 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43

44 45

46

47 48

253

Baioni, ‘Fascismo e risorgimento,’ 46–9. Ibid., 53. Ibid. See, in particular, the essays collected in Federico Chabod e la ‘Nuova storiografia italiana’dal primo al secondo dopoguerra (1919–1950), ed. Brunello Vigezzi (Milan: Jaca Book, 1983). Ibid., 517–19. E. Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics, 53–79. Stone, The Patron State, 177–221. Baioni, ‘Fascismo e risorgimento,’ 54. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 59 (my emphasis). As a result of the Gentile-De Vecchi struggle, Volpe resigned from both the editorship of the Rivista Storica del Risorgimento, which he had held from June to December 1932, and from his membership in the central committee for Risorgimento studies. Predictably Monti took the leadership in this new course by transforming the Archivio della guerra into a Museo della guerra annexed to the Museo del risorgimento. Most other Risorgimento museums chose instead to add to their pre-1932 arrangement one or two rooms displaying local documents, photographs, and relics concerning the Great War and the March on Rome. See Baioni, ‘Fascismo e risorgimento.’ Stone, The Patron State, 194. Ibid., 195. Hitler’s campaign against modern art began as early as 1934 with the closing down of the Bauhaus, and it culminated with the infamous Degenerate Art Exhibition of 1937. Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996), 239–61. On Sironi and the fate of novecento in the 1930s, see Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Silvia Danesi, ‘Aporie dell’architettura italiana in periodo fascista: Mediterraneità e purismo,’ in Il Razionalismo e l’architettura italiana durante il fascismo, ed. S. Danesi and L. Patetta (Venice: La Biennale Edizioni, 1976): 21–8; and Fabio Benzi, ‘La “mediterraneità” nel dibattito artistico italiano degli anni trenta,’ in Luci del mediterraneo, ed. M. Vescovo (Milan: Electa, 1997): 29–35. Stone, The Patron State, 176. Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 25–6.

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Notes to pages 180–2

49 On Piacentini and fascist architecture in general, see Richard Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991). 50 Mario Sironi 1885–1961 (Milan: Electa, 1993); and Racemi d’oro: il mosaico di Sironi nel palazzo dell’informazione (Milan: Immobiliare Metanopoli, 1992). 51 See Loreto Di Nucci, Fascismo e spazio urbano: Le città storiche dell’Umbria (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); Henry A. Millon, ‘Some New Towns in Italy in the 1930s,’ in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. H. Millon and L. Nochlin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983): 326–41; and Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and also, by the same author, ‘Città Fascista: Surveillance and Spectacle,’ Journal of Contemporary History 31, no. 2 (April 1996): 347–72. 52 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 89–118. 53 Stone, The Patron State, 218. 54 ACS: PCM, 1931–1933, f. 5.2.77531. 55 For a brief account in English of the Palazzo Littorio competition, see Tim Benton, ‘Rome Reclaims its Empire,’ in Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators, 1930–45, ed. D. Britt (London: Hayward Gallery, 1996): 123–5. 56 The architects of the MRF’s first façade, Libera and De Renzi, constructed this exhibition complex. 57 On this second edition of the MRF and its relationship to the MAR, see Stone, The Patron State, 244–53. 58 Ibid., 247 and 223. 59 In June 1937 the commission for the Circo Massimo was given to the two architects responsible for the first MRF’s façade, Mario De Renzi and Adalberto Libera. By contrast, the Palazzo Littorio commission was adjudicated to Del Debbio, Foschini, and Morpurgo in October 1937. 60 ‘La Mostra della rivoluzione a valle giulia: Dall’intervento all’impero,’ Messaggero (21 September 1937); and ‘La Mostra della rivoluzione fascista: Dalla cronaca alla storia,’ Il Lavoro Fascista (27 January 1938). 61 The temporal-spatial span of the new edition went from the beginning of the Great War (1914) up to the fascist intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1937) – covering thirty rooms, as opposed to the eighteen of the first edition. 62 The continuity between stile littorio and the museification of the MRF was explicitly exalted or lamented by reviewers of the MRF’s third and final edition, briefly installed in October 1942 to celebrate the second decade of the Revolution. Compare ‘La nuova sistemazione della Mostra della rivoluzione fascista in Roma,’ Architettura (January 1943) with ‘Il Problema fondamentale. La Mostra della rivoluzione,’ Il Popolo di Roma (10 October 1942).

Notes to pages 183–7

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63 See Romke Visser, ‘Fascist Doctrine and the Cult of Romanità,’ Journal of Contemporary History 27 no.1 (January 1992): 5–22; Tim Benton, ‘Rome Reclaims its Empire,’ 121–22; and Spiro Kostof, ‘The Emperor and the Duce: The Planning of Piazzale Augusto Imperatore in Rome,’ in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. H.A. Millon and L. Nochlin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 303. 64 Giulio Quirino Giglioli, Mostra augustea della romanità: catalogo (Rome: C. Colombo, 1937). 65 Anna Maria Liberati Silverio, ‘La Mostra augustea della romanità,’ in Dalla mostra al museo: Roma capitale, 1870–1911 (Venice: Marsilio, 1983): 83–4. 66 Kostof, ‘The Emperor and the Duce,’ 303. 67 Stone, The Patron State, 129–30. 68 Seeking ‘to articulate the increasingly central discourses of empire, war, and race,’ Stone argues, the mass exhibitions of the late 1930s ‘exchanged the dynamic, modernist, and successful exhibition formula in favor of a legible and documentary one not diluted by the abstraction and ambiguity of modernism.’ Ibid., 223. 69 Ibid., 226. The MA’s unrivalled expansion of the MRF’s formula was the fruit of a collaborative effort that involved four of the major protagonists of the fascist exhibition: Sironi, Nizzoli, Pratelli, and Monti. 70 Berezin, Making the Fascist Self, 116. 71 Ibid., 168. 72 Stone, The Patron State, 224. 73 Ibid., 230 and 237. 74 Mario Pagano, ‘Parliamo di esposizioni,’ Casabella-Costruzioni (March–April 1941): 159–60. 75 Ibid., 160. 76 Ibid. 77 Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). 78 For pictures and a useful review of these exhibitions see Roberto Aloi, Esposizioni: Architetture-allestimenti (Milan: Hoepli, 1960). 79 Jeffrey Schnapp (in collaboration with Claudio Fogu), ‘Ogni mostra realizzata è una rivoluzione, ovvero le esposizioni sironiane e l’immaginario fascista,’ in Mario Sironi 1885–1961 (Milan: Electa, 1993), 48–60, and, by the same author, ‘Canto della materia: Il rayon e I tessuti autarchici,’ in Estetica: Le arti e le scienze, ed. S. Zecchi (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995): 211–42. 80 Stone, 224. 81 The uncanny nature of Pagano’s comments on fascist exhibition art can be best appreciated by comparing ‘Parliamo di esposizioni’ with the frontal

256

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83

84 85

86 87 88

Notes to pages 187–90 attack that Pagano launched against the artistic director of the EUR 42, Marcello Piacentini, in another editorial written for Casabella a few months before (‘Occasioni perdute,’ Casabella, 1940, 158). While the idea of the Universal Exhibition can be safely attributed to Mussolini, the central architectural and thematic topos of EUR 42, the Mostra della civiltà italiaca (Exhibition of Italian Civilization), derived from a contemporaneous proposal of a Milanese group of rationalist architects (BBPR) led by the editor Valentino Bompiani. For an exhaustive documentation of, and commentary on, all aspects of EUR 42, see E 42: Utopia e scenario del regime 3 vols. (Venice: Marsilio, 1987–1992). Although the BBPR group was immediately excluded from the realization of their idea, the original architectural and urban designing committee of the EUR 42 – selected in January 1937 – comprised four rationalist architects (Pagano, Piccinato, Rossi, and Vietti) and stile littorio’s chief representative, Marcello Piacentini. By late 1938, however, Piacentini had successfully manoeuvred to gain the support of EUR 42’s chief authority, Vittorio Cini, and dismember the committee and remain sole artistic director of the exhibition. See Enrico Guidoni, ‘L’E 42, città della rappresentazione: Il progetto urbanistico e le polemiche sull’architettura,’ in E 42: Utopia e scenario del regime. Ideologia e programma dell’olimpiade della civiltà: Vol. 1., ed. T. Gregory and A. Tartaro (Venice: Marsilio, 1987): 17–73. Stone, The Patron State, 254. The exhibition’s programmatic document, written by Cini in June 1937, divided EUR 42 into ‘six cities of exhibitions’ that would constitute the six ‘quarters’ of the future city. Vittorio Cini, ‘Documento programmatico,’ cited in Guidoni, ‘L’E 42,’ 44. Ibid. Ibid., 34–5. Ibid., 33. Epilogue

1 ‘Je songe à te proposer d’écrire ensemble une Histoire Universelle.’ Letter from Georges Bataille to Raymond Queneau, published in Marina Galletti, ‘Il sacro nell’ideologia del fascismo,’ Alternative 4 (April 1996): 112 (my translation). 2 ‘Les droits ont su mettre à profit l’expérience communiste et emprunter une partie des méthodes de leurs adversaires. Nous sommes assurés que la réciproque est aujourd’hui nécessaire. Les moyens de propagande et la tactique des fascistes doivent être mis a profit au bénéfice de la cause des travailleurs.’

Notes to pages 190–9

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

257

Handwritten note from Georges Bataille to Pierre Kaan, published in Georges Bataille, Contre-Attaque : Gli anni della militanza antifascista 1932–1939, ed. Marina Galletti (Rome: Edizioni Associate, 1995), 194 (my translation). For the history of Contre-Attaque and Acèphale, see Marina Galletti’s introduction to the volume cited in note 2 above. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. A. Stoekel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 262. Giovanni Gentile, ‘Politica e filosofia,’ in Dopo la vittoria: Nuovi frammenti politica (Rome: Edizioni La Voce, 1920), 148. Reinhard Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985). Ibid., 28–32. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. In connection with the discussion of the relationship between actualism and historic semantics in Chapter 1, I would like to specify at this point that, by tracing the genealogy of actualism from the late eighteenth-century differentiation between ‘historical’ and ‘historic,’ to the late sixteenth-century replacement of ‘evidence’ for ‘evidentia,’ and all the way back to the deep rhetorical caesura between Greek and Latin Christian conceptions of the relationship between narrative, truth, and visual representation, I mean in no way to suggest a polarization between high discursive culture and popular visual culture, visual historic imagination, and narrative historical consciousness. As the case of Kant’s concurrent theorization of ‘Universal History’ and the ‘historical sign’ exemplifies, one must always keep in mind the dialogical structure of these relationships. Similarly, the fluid interchangeability that the adjectives ‘historic’ and ‘historical’ have acquired over time in spoken English unmistakably reminds us of their contingent origin in a burgeoning historical culture very different from both Latin and late humanist cultures. The semiotic relationship of historicness to eventfulness did not merely translate the relationship between Latin imago or Catholic icon and the mental fusion of referent and representation, nor did it isolate the formation of a visual paradigm of historicity from the contemporaneous harnessing of narrativity in the temporization of history. The historical originality, elasticity, and longevity of the modern concept of the historic event can only be appreciated in its simultaneous epochalization of presence, and its assumption of narrative historical consciousness. Insofar as it is perceived as vivid ‘in itself,’ the historic event is positioned at an incommensurable semiotic distance from all historical facts. Insofar as it is vivid ‘in consciousness,’ it affects the metanarrative recoding of all historical events. Whether in its Kantian incar-

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12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19

Notes to pages 199–204 nation as ‘historical sign’ or the historic compounds still in use today, the rhetorical structure of historic event-ness fuses epoch-ness with historicity, while at the same time producing an immediate recoding of narrative consciousness (i.e., Kant’s ‘Universal Progress’). For an introduction in English to the problematic historicization of the Risorgimento in the liberal era, see the classic William Salomone, ‘The Risorgimento between Ideology and History: The Political Myth of the “Rivoluzione Mancata,”’ American Historical Review 68, no. 1 (1962): 38–56, Sergio Romano, ‘Cavour and the Risorgimento,’ Journal of Modern History 88, no. 3 (September 1986): 669–77; and Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1–18. See Umberto Levra, Fare gli italiani: Memoria e celebrazione del Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1992); and Bruno Tobia, Una Patria per gl’italiani (Bari: Laterza, 1991). For a comprehensive review of the historicization of the Risorgimento from the liberal era through fascism, see Walter Maturi, Le Interpretazioni del Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1962); and the essays collected in Il mito del Risorgimento nell’Italia unita: Atti del Convegno, Milano, 9–12 novembre 1993 (Milan: Comune di Milano, 1995). Among these, prominent places were given to the insertion of Risorgimento history in school programs, the creation of national societies for the historical study of the Risorgimento, and the diffusion of Risorgimento museums over the national territory. For the teaching of the Risorgimento in state schools, see Gianni di Pietro, ‘Potere politico e insegnamento della storia dalla fine dell’ottocento alla caaduta del fascismo,’ Quaderni dell’Istituto per la Storia della Resistenza in Provincia di Alessandria, nos. 2–3 (1978): 30–97. The history of the birth and development of Risorgimento institutions and museums is reconstructed in Massimo Baioni, La religione della patria: Musei e istituti del culto risorgimentale (1884–1918) (Treviso: Pagus, 1994). On the peculiar history of the term Risorgimento, see Simonetta Soldani, ‘Risorgimento,’ in Il Mondo contemporaneo: Storia d’italia 3, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1978), 1132–58. Giovanni Sabbatucci, ‘La grande guerra e i miti del Risorgimento,’ in Il mito del Risorgimento, 215. Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989), 77–178. Sabbatucci, ‘La grande guerra,’ 216. Kriss Ravetto, The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

Notes to pages 204–6

259

20 Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism,’ in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1980). 21 Alexandre Kojève, ‘Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,’ Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit Assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books [1947], 1969): 147–52. 22 Ibid., 147. 23 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 28. 24 R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London and New York: Arnold, 1998), 25–6.

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INDEX

Acéphale, 191–2 actualism, 13, 26, 27, 36–51, 199, 217n21, 221n67, 222n88, 223n91; etymology of term, 48; founding document of, 46; and futurism, 46; genealogy of, 257n10; and modernism, 46 Adamson, Walter, 45 Adorno, Theodor, 5 aestheticization of politics. See politics, aestheticization of aesthetic politics, 6 aesthetics: avant-garde, 4, 5–6, 167, 184, 187, 195; modernist, 13, 103 agency, historic, 10, 43, 103, 182, 193, 194, 195; and the MRF, 138, 139 agency, historical, 7, 8, 10, 34, 47 agent, 15; historic, 10, 15, 55, 56, 94, 103, 192; historical, 12, 14, 201 Alfieri, Dino, 134–5, 143, 152, 170–2, 240n20, 246n54, 249n87 Androetti, Libero, 147, 157 anniversary celebrations of the March on Rome, 55 antimodernism, 179, 181 appello, 88, 93–4, 157, 236n43

Archivio della Guerra (War Archive), 53–4, 55, 56–7, 60, 228n41, 253n40 Arco dei Caduti, 88 art: avant-garde, 4; degenerate, 4; exhibition, see exhibition culture, fascist; futurist, 70; Nazi, 9 autoctisi, 46 avant-garde movement, 5 Bann, Stephen, 59, 60, 61, 62, 116–17 Bardi, Pietro Maria, 121, 131–2, 133 Bataille, Georges, 3–4, 6, 8, 10, 16, 17, 18–19, 190–2, 197, 206; ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ 3 Baudrillard, Jean, 63 Belardelli, Giovanni, 28 Benjamin, Walter, 18, 64, 213n56 Berezin, Mabel, 55, 184–5 Bolsheviks, 194; five-year plans of, 17, 166 Bosworth, K.B.J., 206 Burger, Peter, 5 burial of the Unknown Soldier (1921), 85–6 Cambellotti, Duilio, 83

262

Index

Camicia Rossa, 234n28, 242n8 Capodivacca, Alberto, 143 Caporetto, 42, 44, 54 Carpanetti, Arnaldo, 143, 145 Casabella, 185–6 catastrophe of the histori(ographi)cal act, 13, 47, 60, 83, 103, 141, 168, 170, 183, 194 Cavour, Count Camillo Benso di, 27, 72, 199 celebrations, Garibaldian, 15–16, 72–95, 96–113, 115, 116, 121, 173, 176, 177, 235n41 Cinquantenario (garibaldino). See celebrations, Garibaldian Ciotti. See Garibaldi, Ciotti Circo Massimo exhibitions, 184, 185, 187, 254n59 codes, rhetorical 11; Latin Catholic, 10, 13–16, 20, 57, 104, 169, 195; and Antonio Monti, 70; and the MRF, 133, 164; and waxworks, 118 commemoration, 184–5 conjectural paradigm, 7 consciousness, historical 20, 34, 43, 47, 50, 66, 103, 193, 257n10 Contre-Attaque, 190, 191 Corio, Ludovico, 62, 228n41 Correnti, Cesare, 61 Cotugno, Raffaele, 96–8, 104, 105 Critica Fascista, 22–3 Croce, Benedetto, 21–2, 25–6, 30–3, 35–7, 47; and Antonio Monti, 60; Mussolini’s attack on, 31–5, 77; Storia d’Italia, 22, 30, 31, 35 culture: fascist, 15–16, 190, 192–3, 196; fascist historic, 10, 17, 165–89; historic(al), 197–203; Latin Catholic visual, 10, 13, 45, 48–51, 95; mod-

ernist, 5, 14, 66; Nazi, 6; posthistoric(al), 20, 203–6; ritual, 55 D’Andrea, Ugo, 168 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 182 decade, 16, 196, 202, 203–6, 251n4 decennale, 74, 113, 114, 121, 133, 150, 162–7, 176, 184 Del Debbio, Enrico, 181, 183 Deleuze, Gilles, 233n26 Del Noce, Augusto, 27, 40, 43, 46, 221n67 De Vecchi, Cesare Maria, 173–8, 180 documentaries. See LUCE ducismo, 12, 56–7, 76, 77, 193, 195 Emmanuel, King Victor, 72, 73, 87, 199 enàrgeia, 48–50, 183, 194, 224n102; and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 133, 168, 171–2; and the Garibaldian Exhibition, 131; and Mussolini’s 1932 speech, 94, 100–12; and waxworks, 119, 120 exhibition culture, fascist 17, 184–9 exhibitions: Aeronautics Exhibition, 184, 185, 187; Exhibition of Augustan Rome, 181–3, 184; Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 16, 70, 114, 121, 132–73, 180–6, 196, 202, 248n63, 254n62; —, and Georges Bataille, 3–4, 190–2; —, as imago, 169, 177, 178, 182, 185, 187; Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome, 16, 114–22, 125, 126, 152; EUR 42, 184, 197–9, 202, 256n82; Garibaldian Exhibition 16, 70, 114, 121–32, 135, 136; Historical Exhibition of Fascism, 134

Index Fachinelli, Elvio, 44–5 Falasca-Zamponi, Simmetta, 23 Federazione Nazionale Volontari Garibaldini, 234n29 femininity, fascist, 79–82 fetishism, 63, 65 Freddi, Luigi, 135, 138, 139, 152, 171, 240n20, 246n55, 247n60 Freedberg, David, 118–19 Friedrich, Ernst, 52–3 Fukuyama, Francis, 20 futurism, 5, 6, 46, 47, 115, 164, 179, 185, 209n20, 213n56, 250n93 futurists, 45, 247n55 Gallery of Fasces, 145–6, 154, 157–62 Gallery of Uniforms, 127–32, 152, 160, 177 Garibaldi, Anita Riviero, 74, 78, 230n8 Garibaldi, Ciotti, 84, 234n31 Garibaldi, Ezio, 77–9, 82, 84–6, 88 Garibaldi, Ricciotti Sr, 73, 77, 84 Garibaldianism, 73, 82, 83–5, 86, 88, 89, 90, 101, 103, 233n27; and the Garibaldian Exhibition, 114, 121, 126–7, 129, 130, 132 Gentile, Giovanni, 13, 25–8, 35, 36–51, 65, 119, 170, 171, 175, 176, 193–4, 195, 199, 201–2, 205, 217n21, 221n67, 222n88; declining influence of, 174, 197; and La Voce, 223n91; on Leninism, 221n73; and modernism, 45–51; and Antonio Monti, 60; Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 28; ‘Politica e filosofia,’ 40, 43, 47, 50, 60, 201, 221n67. See also actualism Gerarchia, 28 Gesamtkunstwerk, 4, 143, 182, 184, 187 Geschichte, 198–9

263

Giglioli, Giulio Quirino, 183 Ginzburg, Carlo, 14, 49 Gombrich, Ernst, 19, 163 Gramsci, Antonio, 46 Great War: in actualist thought, 41–4; and history belonging to the present, 65; and modernist conception of history, 34–5; and museums, 60–71, 134–5; and trauma, 15, 53–7 Greenberg, Clement, 5 Greenblatt, Steven, 19 Hay, James, 106 historia magistra vitae, 20, 198 historic: culture, 10, 17, 165–89; event, 177, 193, 198, 257n10; eventfulness, 10, 33–4, 35, 38, 48, 50, 193; site, 17; spectacle, 15, 16, 72–95, 107 historicalness, 10 historic/historical, 33–4, 121–2, 198–9, 200, 211n38, 257n10; modes of representation, 10, 16; and the MRF, 156–7 historicness, 10, 33–4, 48, 57, 257n10; Kant’s conception of, 39, 199 history: actualist philosophy of, 13, 66, 173, 175, 177, 178, 193, 195, 197, 201; end of, 20; fascist poetics of, 7; fascist politics of, 6, 7, 9, 10, 13, 23–31, 192; fascist reclaiming of, 174–8; fascist vision of, 7, 12–13; historic vision of, 9–10; immanent conception of, 34; liberal philosophy of, 13, 192; Marxist philosophy of, 8, 13, 36, 41, 43, 194; modernist vision of, 8, 39; Nazi politics of, 8–9 history belonging to the future, 177, 183, 185, 187

264

Index

history belonging to the past, 43, 103, 132, 197, 201; and waxworks, 119 history belonging to the present, 13, 17, 21–52, 60, 61, 65, 66, 103, 132, 164, 182, 193, 194, 196, 197, 201–2 history-making, fascist, 21, 23, 31, 33, 34, 43, 193; and Antonio Monti, 70 history-writing, liberal, 21, 23, 31, 33, 34, 43, 193 Hitler, Adolf, 4, 253n43 Huyssen, Andreas, 5 hypericon, 19, 57, 111, 118, 130, 192 ideology, fascist, 4, 17, 186 Il Popolo d’Italia, 28, 98–9, 135, 167, 170, 172, 183, 196, 232n20, 249n87; in the MRF, 138–45 Il Popolo di Roma, 101–2, 103 image, 11–12; fascist, 122 imagery, Latin Catholic 55 imaginary: collective, 211n41; definition of, 11; fascist, 33; fascist historic, 11–12, 15–16, 34, 35, 51, 53, 55, 57, 66, 103, 107–13, 121, 132–64, 166, 169, 172, 177, 179, 183, 184, 185, 197–9, 193–5; historic, 10–11, 19, 43, 45, 50, 90, 105, 212n41; Italian Catholic, 14; Mussolinian, 12, 55–6 imago, 49–50, 103, 105, 112, 118, 162–3, 166, 169, 177, 178, 182, 194, 257n10 immanence, 19, 129, 154, 194, 217n21 Institute of Roman Studies, 115 Internationales Anti-Kriegs Museum (International Anti-War Museum), 52–3 Isnenghi, Mario, 76 Italian National Society for the Study

of the Risorgimento (INSRI), 173–5, 180 Kaan, Pierre, 190 Kant, Immanuel, 37–9, 42, 47, 48, 199 Kojève, Alexander, 20, 205 Koselleck, Reinhard, 197–8 Koshar, Rudy, 9 Lacan, Jacques, 211n41 La Critica, 25–6, 60 La Voce, 5, 45, 46, 47, 223n91 Lavoro fascista, 170 littoral style, 178–83, 185, 186, 187, 196, 202, 254n62, 256n83 Longanesi, 154 Longenbach, James, 48 LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educative), 105, 106, 107, 167, 230n3, 239nn17, 18, 240n20, 241n25 Lyotard, Jean-François, 20, 206 March on Rome, 15, 16; as historic agent, 205; yearly commemorations of, 184 Marconi, Guglielmo, 182 Marinetti, F.T., 179, 187 Marxism, 36, 41, 43 mass culture, 4, 5, 6, 10; evolution of, 192, 204; fascist, 35 mass media, 97–113 Matteotti, Giacomo, 26 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 25, 27, 50, 72, 73, 199, 200 mentality, 11; fascist, 10–11, 44 microhistory, 14–15 Misciatelli, Marquis Piero, 180 Mitchell, W.J.T., 19, 237n9 modernism, 5, 34–5, 209n20; fascist,

Index 4–6, 17, 18, 167, 178, 180–4, 187, 195, 196; legacy of, 204 modernismo, 6 modernist front, fascist, 120–1 modernist movement in architecture. See razionalismo modernist sensitivity, 5 modernity, 17–20, 188 Monti, Antonio, 15, 52–71, 114, 121, 122–32, 133, 165–6, 168, 169, 177, 225n8, 226nn11, 23, 228n41, 245n 54, 247n60, 249n87, 253n40; curatorial practices of, 66–71, 229n49, 245n34; and Sironi, 160 monument to Anita Garibaldi, 75–85, 96, 108, 173; inauguration ceremony of, 96–113 Mosse, George, 8, 18 Mostra aeronautica. See exhibitions, Aeronautics Exhibition Mostra augustea della romanità. See exhibitions, Exhibition of Augustan Rome Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (MRF). See exhibitions, Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution Mostra di Roma nell’ottocento (MRO). See exhibitions, Exhibition of Nineteenth-Century Rome Mostra d’oltremare, 184 Mostra garibaldina (MG). See exhibitions, Garibaldian Exhibition Mostra storica del facismo. See exhibitions, Historical Exhibition of Fascism Museum of the Risorgimento in Milan (MRM), 53–71; central room of, 67–70; characterization of Risorgimento in, 68

265

Mussolini, Benito, 4, 6, 7, 12, 21–3, 27, 31–5, 53–7, 73, 165–6, 169, 173, 174, 175, 177, 180–1, 182, 192, 194, 221n67; attack on Croce, 31–5; Cult of, 12, 56–7, 76–7, 193, 195; dead body of, 197; and the Garibaldian celebrations, 74–95; on LUCE newsreels, 241n20; in the MRF, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 152, 154; myth of, 15; relationship with Ezio Garibaldi, 231n14; and speech at inauguration of Anita Garibaldi’s monument, 96–113, 237n6, 238n11; speech of 1929, 55; speeches of, 32–5, 45; and Universal Exhibition of Rome, 187; War Diary, 54 mussolinismo, 55–7, 226n13 mussolinismo-ducismo, 12 National Committee for Risorgimento Studies, 174 National Federation of Garibaldian Veterans, 84 nationalism, 5 National Museum of the Risorgimento, 181 nazification of fascist ideology, 186 Nazism, 3–4, 6, 8, 17, 27, 179, 194; one thousand years’ Reich of, 166 newspapers, modernization of, 240n19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 34 normative style. See style, normative novecento, 247n55 Orano, Paolo, 168–9 Oriani, 27 Ortega y Gasset, José, 209n20 Pacini, Renato, 131

266

Index

Pagano, Mario, 185–6, 187, 188, 255n81 Palazzo delle esposizioni, 114, 121, 127–8, 131, 135 Palazzo Littorio, 181, 182, 183, 254n59 Paluzzi, Carlo Galassi, 115–16, 242n8 Passerini, Luisa, 11, 12, 55–6, 76 Permanent Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 181, 182 Piacentini, Marcello, 180, 256n83 Pifferi, Camillo, 167–8 politics: aestheticization of, 16, 18, 23, 163, 195, 167, 169, 172–3, 213n56; image-, 4, 6, 14, 17, 18, 70, 112, 114, 122, 166, 178, 185, 186, 214n3; ritual-, 14, 17, 166, 173, 177, 178; sacralization of, 9, 18, 74, 89, 163, 195, 213n55 Polverelli, Gaetano, 170 Queneau, Raymond, 190 razionalismo, 121, 179, 247n55, 256n82, 83 representation: historic, 34, 10; historical, 34, 47; ritual, 13; visual, 13 revolutionary syndicalism, 5 rhetorics of virility, 5, 18, 33–5 Riegel, Alois, 62 Risorgimento: and Garibaldian celebrations, 74–5; in historical discourse, 25–30, 40; as imago, 200; and museums, 60–71; and nationalization, 199–201; as word, 200 Risorgimento museums, 61–2, 63, 66; Antonio Monti’s criticism of, 65 ritual, 16 Rome, fascist conception of, 23–4 Royal Institute for Risorgimento Studies, 174, 175

Rutelli, Mario, 79, 82–5, 91, 94, 232n20 sacred, the, 16, 18, 19, 44, 192 Sapori, Francesco, 168 Sarfatti, Margherita, 133–4, 160, 167 scenoplasti. See waxworks Schnapp, Jeffrey, 134, 135–6, 150–1, 162, 252n19 Sciorsci, Costantino, 119–20, 121 Sciortino, Antonio, 78–9, 82, 83, 85, 231n15, 233n25 Secolo XIX, 101, 102–3 Section P (Propaganda Section), 28, 31 Sironi, Mario, 145, 150–3, 160, 180, 187, 249n87, 250n88; novecento movement and, 179 Slatapar, Scipio, 46 Sontag, Susan, 204 Sorel, George, 5 Spackmann, Barbara, 18, 32–3, 35 Speer, Albert, 180 Stefani Agency, 98–9, 237n5, 8 Sternhall, Zeev, 43, 214n3 stile littorio. See littoral style Stone, Marla, 179, 180, 184 style, Italy as, 204; normative, 19, 163–4, 187–8, 204 Terragni, Giuseppe, 147 thaumaturgic Duce, 15, 52–71, 74, 112, 163, 196 Third National Congress of Fascist Intellectuals, 165, 170, 172–3, 176, 177, 178 Traccia storico–politica della mostra del facismo (Political–Historical Outline for the Exhibition of Fascism), 138

Index

267

Turi, Giovanni, 40 Twelfth Congress of Risorgimento Historians, 63, 244n23

Volpe, Giocchino, 22, 27–8, 31, 32, 170, 174–6, 218n40, 253n39; L’Italia in cammino, 22, 27, 29, 31

Veeser, Aram, 19 ventennio, 6, 9, 12, 23, 44, 45, 55 visual culture. See culture, Latin Catholic visual Voce, La, 5, 6, 46, 47, 223n91 Vociani. See Voce, La

waxworks, 117–22, 125, 130 White, Hayden, 34–5, 47 Zamponi, Simonetta Falasca, 79 Zunino, Piergiorgio, 9, 23, 24, 214n3