HISTORY

and Germany covered an aggressive foreign policy in the Horn of Africa which resulted in slaughter at the hands of Ethiopian tribesmen at Adua (or Adowa). This Italian defeat poisoned the political atmosphere, giving rise to a clamorous nationalist movement responsible for military intervention in Libya in 1911 and Italy’s belated decision to join the Entente side in 1915. Duggan gives a moving account of the fate of peasant boys dragooned into the hopeless battles of the Isonzo, and the mounting rage that accompanied the mutilated peace which resulted. The fanatic Left made the Allende-type mistake of indulging in a gestural rural and municipal socialism in the ‘red biennial’ which elicited the Fascist backlash orchestrated by the maverick former socialist Mussolini. Italy’s imperfect democracy was dismantled by the mid1920s and replaced by a Fascist police state whose oppressive weight was felt more by the southern Mafia than by political opponents, who were quarantined in remote southern villages. The regime executed all of twenty-five people. Mussolini also sought a moral and physical revolution, from which would spring a martial ‘new man’, who foreigners would no longer confuse with clowns, organ grinders and waiters. This failed to come about, despite the propagation of manliness, the adoption of the goose-stepping passo romano and the Roman salute. ‘Oi voi’, so to speak, for the formal ‘Lei’, was abandoned as too bourgeois. For the first time in the eighty-year history of the unified Italian state, ancient Rome became exemplary, while war was used to forge a sense of Fascist nationhood. Ironically, much of central Rome was ruined to bring this vision about. Barbaric imperial campaigns were launched in Libya and Ethiopia, reliant upon concentration camps, mass executions and, to secure rapid victory, at Mussolini’s express insistence, bombing with mustard and arsine gas to wipe out resistance. Like the ancient Romans at Carthage, the Fascists made a desert and called it civilisation. Intervention in Spain cemented the fateful alliance with Hitler, and a final disastrous war. By 1943–45 this had also become an Italian civil war in which 44,000 resistance fighters lost their lives. The chapters on postwar and contemporary Italy are

Springing into action: Mussolini’s New Men

relatively disappointing. An allegedly inspiring antiFascist vision among resisters gave way to the machine politics of Christian Democrats and Communists, while few steps were taken to purge Italy of former Fascists or to hold war-crimes trials. There is an interesting account of the consequences of internal migration, with some nine million southerners (and islanders) going to Milan and Turin, and of how Italians opted for the rampant consumerism of New York rather than Moscow, even though those who had named their kids Uliano or Vladimiro also shed a fond tear on the death of Stalin. Marshal Aid and membership of the EEC transformed Italy into a prosperous place. The state remained the main problem. Duggan incisively criticises the Christian Democrats, who, leaving ‘ethics’ to a Church they pulled away from, colonised the machinery of the state so as to pack the hugely bloated public sector with their own clients. In one Catania hospital, where everyone from the surgeons to the cleaners was a Christian Democrat, the CD Senator director bussed in extra patients to boost his party’s vote. Finally, readers get perfunctory accounts of the implosion of the political system in the wake of ‘Bribesville’, Red Brigade and neo-Fascist terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, the struggle against the Comorra and Mafia, and the rise of the Northern League, National Alliance, Forza Italia and so forth. The last parts of the book read as if 9/11 had not happened. Duggan’s Italy is very white, albeit with a fetching tan, as if Arab and African refugees are not rowing there each day. There is no mention either of Milan as a major centre of Islamist radicalism, notably the sinister role of its Islamic Cultural Institute in several major Al Qaeda or North African terror cells, or the sterling work done by the Italian police and secret service in crushing this. These chapters lack the surefootedness and verve of what went before. So Duggan’s book may not explain much of what you see around you on your Tuscan holiday – the posters, the press, the books, the Africans selling trinkets or themselves in Florence – but it is an impressive and essential guide to how Italy was shaped by the last two hundred years. To order this book at £24, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007