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Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero, 1995John Thayer aa University of MinnesotaPublished online: 25 Apr 2008.

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Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero, 1995

John Thayer

University of Minnesota

The fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Italy, the destruction ofMussolini's Italian Social Republic (RSI), the republic of Said, the partisans'slaughter of Said's leaders, ending Fascism's most brutal phase, has generatedseveral important histories. Two are by journalist-historians who took part inthose events on opposite sides: anti-Fascist veteran'of the partisan movementGiorgio Bocca's La Repubblica di Mussolini (Milan, 1995), and Fascist infantryofficer Mario Cervi's Said: Album delta Repubblica (Milan, 1995), a photocollection with accompanying critical commentary.

However, it was public reaction to Renzo De Felice's Mussolini: L'alleato — laguena civile (1995) that provoked Rosso e Nero (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1995),in which De Felice replied to critics who viewed his final volume as a defense ofSalo, whose nineteen months (1943-5) included the redrafting of the 1938 anti-Jewish laws which deprived Jews of civil rights, so making them wartimeenemies and to be treated as such. Rosso e Nero's publishers praise De Felice as'Italy's foremost historian', a claim that those offended by his study of the lastphase of Italy's war may dispute on political grounds — something he quiteexpected. But when it comes to dedication to careful research, De Felice'simpressive studies of modern Italian history will stand as models of archivaldocumentation, indispensable for our understanding, not only of the rise andtwenty-year life of Fascism — the ventennio — but of European history in thiscentury.

Rosso e Nero has set off another 'debate among historians' that will be with usas long as the concluding carnage of World War II is alive in the historian'sconsciousness, and will be no less intense than controversy over the Bolshevikand Hiderian revolutions. Public and academic dissent, and now a book1 basedon De Felice's claim that the British ordered Mussolini's execution by partisansin order to prevent him from revealing his contacts with Churchill are evidenceof Rosso e Nero's polemical aspects.

Given the passions this work has called forth — including a suspected attack onDe Felice's residence — it is important to be clear as to what he does and does notsay, and also to understand "Rosso e Nero as a patriot's message to a country heleaves behind. More importantly, this is a methodological statement, intended as

© l999Routledge 1354-57IXJournal of Modern Italian Studies 4(1)1999:97-116

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a critique of what De Felice regards as a myth in the guise of historiographywhich, if not debunked by solid research, would continue to corrupt Italianpolitics, and even turn the general public against the historian's craft itself.

If De Felice's intent is lost sight of, the critical spirit he upholds will give wayto more 'political kitsch', as he calls it, an 'emotive' bathos, academicallyunsound, product of a 'cultural authoritarianism' conspicuous in postwarscholarship, akin to the political cant in Milan Kundera's portrait of the stump-orator in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to which De Felice refers (pp. 12,24).De Felice would write instead an 'objective' account, an 'authentic' history,product of the 'scientific habitus' he found in short supply during a postwar agethat lived, ideologically and methodologically, imprisoned by a legend (pp. 13,15, 24, 54).

De Felice's Rankean promise to write a 'true' because 'correct' history, asreaders will quickly note, remains an unattainable goal. Rosso e Nero's existentialclaim, that of describing political reality in all its particulars, avoiding lapses intoideological-sociological generalizations, is no exception. But while the readerwill note passages of patriotic anguish, as if the course of history has beenunfriendly to Italy, expressions of sentiments and political partisanship that evena master of archival documentation cannot avoid, it is important to stress DeFelice's central theme: the purification of Italian and European historiography.

As an 'objective' history, Rosso e Nero was to have no bias. It was not to be alament for or a celebration of the war's last two yean, from Mussolini'sdefenestration (25 July 1943) and subsequent rescue by Hitler's commandos, tothe war between the partisans and the forces of Salo and its German allies,marked by episodes of popular vengeance illustrated in Cervi's Album. The taskof 'authentic' scholarship was to rise above sentimentality, fulfilling history'smission by revealing a pseudo-historical literature promoted by the 'FirstRepublic', as it is now known. "With the January 1948 promulgation of itsconstitution, what emerged was a mere 'society', a convenient arrangement thatlacked any foundation in the 'people'; a regime, moreover, that was the creationnot of a crusade for freedom, but of fratricidal war and foreign conquest.

The scandals that tell De Felice that the First Republic is moribund are butsymptoms of a genetic illness: a half-century of political-historiographicalhypocrisy, endless prudential accommodations and a state-sponsored hagiogra-phy. The genuine, because truly patriotic, 'liberation' Italy but also WesternEurope needs as a whole is from a 'mytho-poetic' literature. It is on just such aflimsy and historically incorrect base that the First Republic's founders have, forfifty yean, based their claim to power. As for the 'people', in their 'existentialexperience', they played little part in all these events. As a consequence, Italiansbelieve neither in the myth nor in the governments that built and exploited it.Hence their rejection of a 'society' that is 'ethically and politically without solidvalues' (pp. 16, 24-5).

De Felice's dismal opinion of Italian politics is scarcely unique. Bocca,prominent columnist, nom de plume 'The Anti-Italian', crusaded for years to

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' Renzo De Felice, Rosso e Nero, 1995

end the career of seven-times Premier Giulio Andreotti, Bocca's symbol of the'politician'. Bocca's history of Said also celebrates the First Republic's end, andwith it, the end of trasformismo (p. viii), a neologism dating to 1876, Italiansynonym for place-holding and absence of national ideals. However, Bocca's LaRepubblica di Mussolini, richly annotated with interviews with his survivingpartisan comrades, is the work of a journalist-historian. It is in another realmfrom De Felice's critique of the methodological-ideological origins of a politicsso false at its foundations as to threaten Italy's survival as a nation (pp. 19—20).

As a prophet castigating those who would deceive his people, De Felicedefined the heresy: the 'vulgata resistenziale'. This 'Bible of the Resistance' hassilenced almost all who have challenged its orthodoxy. There have been some,he grants, who have shared his claim, a major theme of his monumentalbiography of Mussolini, that the ventennio was an era of national 'consensus', aposition that is restated in Rosso e Nero (p. 22). Although unable to index andextinguish all examples of such heterodoxy, the 'vulgata' has been able to controlhistorical literature, simply because the 1948 Republic was a political instrumentof the partisan triumph, itself a victory won almost exclusively by foreigninvading armies. Those holding postwar power have added ideological spoilsof war in the form of a falsification of history to the vae victis of the massacre ofthe leaders of Said.

What was the worst fear among all those who have lived off this falsetestament, if not that one day a reformer would appear to reveal the truth tohis people?

The Resistance was a great historical event. No 'revisionism' will eversucceed in denying it. But history, as opposed to ideology and belief, isbased on the truth of the facts rather than on absolutist certitude: to describethe world as it was, not as one would like it to have been. A historiographicvulgata, aggressively hegemonic, constructed for reasons of ideology (in orderto legitimize the new democracy by means of anti-Fascism), but often usedfor political ends (legitimizing with democracy the Communist Left), hascreated, instead, a series of stereotypes which have prevented us fromdisentangling, these past fifty years, that intricate snarl of unresolved knottyproblems: Italy's defeat and the crisis of national identity; the decisive militaryrole played by the Anglo-American armies, and the frustration among theanti-Fascists; the Resistance's military limitations and the Realpolitik of theCommunist and Catholic parties; the monarchy's historic inconsistency andthe ethical-political inadequacy of the bourgeoisie.

(PP. 44-5)

The outlines of the Resistance, torn loose from their real context, are lost in ahaze. Fascists, Germans, Allies in most cases remain faceless competitors thatbring to mind the choruses of certain Greek tragedies; and the partisans, withno better-identified masses that are said to back them up (but whose real

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attitudes and motives Resistance historiography almost never delves into),become the only protagonists. For all the talk and writing that has gone on,many pages of Resistance history still remain blank, and, above all, are treatedwith an animus not only more ideological-political than historical, but clearlydependent on circumstantial changes and political tactics. . . . Therefore, theResistance, in the eyes of most, has come to take on, especially among theyoung who are unaware of its existential dimensions, the aspect of a myth ofsorts, whose only effect is boredom, a lack of interest, or a wish to hearanother tune.

(pp. 12-13)

Hence it is no surprise that — contrary to what has happened in othercountries, and in France especially2 — here in Italy the fiftieth anniversary ofthe Resistance (and of the RSI) has not given rise to a real historiographicaldebate.

(p. 17)

The patriot-historian calls on the intellectuals who fabricated the legend toface the unpleasant but therapeutic truth: the so-called Armistice of 8 September1943 was a humiliating defeat, bluntly documented in the German Command'sbulletin of 10 September: 'Italy's armed forces no longer exist.' From Sicily tothe Alps, the troops disbanded. It was tutti a casa. The king and the PrimeMinister General Badoglio fled. Out of this disgraceful episode the FirstRepublic was born. Unlike October 1917, after Caporetto, when the bourgeoi-sie gathered itself together and rallied the forces that stood fast on the Piave untilvictory was won, the debacle of 8 September called into question the veryexistence of an Italian state. De Felice quotes the judgment of a 'great historianof liberal Italy', the late Rosario Romeo, Cavour's biographer, who wrote thatthe defeat revealed an 'ethical-political' weakness in national sentiment that mayeven be traced back to the pre-Unification era (pp. 32—3).

De Felice refuses to see, as political philosopher Norberto Bobbio did, Italy's'tragic date' not in the defeat of 8 September but rather in the 10 June 1940invasion of France. For Bobbio, the war was unpopular from the start, so muchso that by the time surrender eame, the people 'had so radically lost the idea ofthe nation as to wish that Italy would lose the war'. This De Felice firmly denies.Initial public backing, he insists, was more widespread than that of May 1915when Italy entered World War I. He would show this by additional archivalevidence he was gathering. World War II need not have ended in abjectdependency on foreign arms. What was missing in the Italy of 1943 was:

an anti-Fascist leader of de Gaulle's qualities, a soldier with the presence tosummon Italians to the defense of the patria. The fact remains, however, thatthis order was not sent forth; and in three days the Germans reversed thenumerically disadvantaged situation in which they found themselves. Around

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Rome there were six Italian divisions, but the bulk of the Italian army wasnot put into the field and, with no orders, it quickly dissolved.

(pp. 35, 40)

Readers of Rosso e Nero who see it as an apology for Fascism, or arecommendation for factions that have stood by the regime's positive achieve-ments, either the Italian Social Movement (MSI) that has been in politics eversince the war's end, or the more recent National Alliance (AN) that has absorbedall save a fringe of the MSI, will miss Rosso e Nero's message. De Felice'sinterpretation is not merely non-partisan. It is a condemnation of ideology,with which he identifies the profession of politics per se. A leader who mighthave spared the country the disgrace of 1943 is pointedly an anti-Fascist, whoseonly passion — and it is this De Felice claims for himself— is that of a pure patriot.Rosso e Nero, read with respect for a major figure in modern historiography andnot with an eye to the polemics it has sparked, is a defense neither of the war norof the Axis Pact, save to those who wish to see it as such. Writing as the 'purehistorian' of the patria, De Felice hoped to rise above 'Reds' and 'Blacks', tostand forth at the close of career and life as a voice of the 'real nation' of the'people'. The focus on the two yean of Said is needed because its story, in itsexistential reality, has not been scientifically treated; also because it was a newchapter in Italy's destiny. Fascism as such died with the defenestration of itscreator. There was no going back. De Felice cites a 'master of Italian history',Vittorio De Caprariis:

Certainly there was no nostalgia, between 1943 and 1944, for the defunctregime, but something more grievous. The frightening shock, the dumb-struck stupor at the defeat; weariness with the enormity of the battle and apsychological surrender in the face of the extent of the ruin, as of one who,having fought in vain against overwhelming force, in the end, the spiritgiving way, allows death to come.

(p. 44)

To restore national will to live as a sovereign culture, also to save theprofessional historian from the contamination of endless self-appointed tribunesof the people masquerading as serious scholars, demands that we look at thebiennium of the Resistance, 1943—5, from a loftier vantage point than theconventional political moralism we have been fed since the close of World WarII, that is since the victory of the invading Allies:

Much is known, or has been documented, about the Resistance, and, thoughto a lesser extent, about the RSI. The real, the decisive gap, is due to the lackof a general motivational frame of reference for the events of 1943-45, whichwould have a place for the Resistance, but also for the RSI (each of which, inand of itself, involved a minority of the population in those regions wherethese movements were present); a framework which would find a place also

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for the 'human condition' during those years, with its multiplicity ofattitudes, moral and material problems, hopes, delusions.

(pp. 21-2)

Neither Fascists nor anti-Fascists; neither Communists nor anti-Communistsare, as such, the people's legitimate explainers of what took place in thoseyears, and how it was important for the history of today's Italy. And besides,the people no longer have confidence in them, and look upon them aspurveyors of myths in which they no longer believe, and to which theyattribute a good part of the responsibility for the situation in which Italy findsitself today; and, what is more serious, they extend this negative judgment, asto their reconstruction of history, to history tout court.

(pp. 24-5)

It is a century since Fustel de Coulanges could claim that 'it is not I whospeak, but history'; only then to be shown that it was the tragedy of France,Sedan, and the corruption of the Third Republic that followed that was thesource of his grief and the motive that led him to redeem his fallen patrie bymeans of an imaginative reconstruction of European history. De Felice concedesthat the legend of the Resistance has had a 'mythopoetic value', therefore not tobe discounted as 'useless along with the regime to which it gave origin' (p.. 106).With this concession to the power of the Historical Imagination, the Rankeancurator of archival materials set forth to explore a series of mysteries, deceptions,intrigues, in the hope of replacing the vulgata with a history designed to salvagethe honor of his defeated country.

This is pointedly the case when dealing with the victorious Communists,who have 'waved the bloody shirt', as an American of the post-Civil Wardecades would say. Palmiro Togliatti's svolta di Salerno, his proclamation uponreturning from the USSR of a 'new party' — not, that is to say, the 'new kind ofparty' Lenin announced in 1904 — was a slogan intended to allow ItalianCommunist leaden to pass the party off as a genuinely domestic organization.It has now been revealed, with the opening of Soviet archives, to have beenStalin's idea. The pretense that it was Togliatti's was to conceal the fact that theparty 'has always been a Stalinist party, neither revolutionary nor reformist, partof the power system of the USSR'. The signing of the amnesty by Togliatti asMinister of Justice in the 1945 De Gasperi government was disingenuous, itbeing obvious that a purge of Fascists after twenty years of their control wouldhave entailed wiping out the civil services. What the famous amnesty did,however, was to anger those partisans who wanted vengeance, only to fall intoline when the Communist heads demanded unity. The party then proceeded,though officially excluded by orders of the conquering Anglo-Americans, toenter into what De Felice calls an 'imperfect bipartisanship' with the ruling elite.It was this blatant insincerity that inspired a few to speak of a 'betrayal of therevolution', to reject the Stalinist-Togliattian charade and to ask, as the RedBrigades did, if so much violence was justified to crush the Republic of Salo,

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why not also to bring down Christian Democracy and execute Aldo Moro (pp.72-6)?

Equally suggestively, De Felice notes that since the democracies recognizedFascism as a legitimate government — to such an extent that the historian andanti-Salo partisan Federico Chabod wrote that it would take a fat volume torecord the regime's popularity, especially in Anglo-Saxon lands3 — was it notpossible that the vulgata owed much to efforts of the victorious 'crusaders inEurope' to conceal evidence that would demonstrate, not western anti-Fascismand democratic idealism, but rather the truth that the victorious democraciesand the Duce were playing the same game, balance of power and reason of state?

No sooner had the 'crusade' ended than questions were raised about the finaldestination of papers Mussolini was carrying out of Italy, disguised as a Germansoldier, when the convoy was intercepted by partisans of the 52nd GaribaldiBrigade. Witnesses heard him tell his captors to take good care of them, that theywere 'important for Italy'. They were said to include correspondence withPetain, Laval, Roosevelt, Hitler and Churchill, plus some information about theking and materials relating to the trial of Count Ciano. There was also talk of afabulous 'Treasure of Dongo', the town where Mussolini was held before beingtaken away to be, so. it appeared, turned over to the Allies, only to be executedalong the way alongside his lover, Claretta Petacci. At the time Churchill wassaid to have burned his Mussolini correspondence.

It is a story told long ago, in a book4 hostile to the partisans, especially theCommunists, who are pictured as preparing for a Bolshevik takeover in whichthe perfidy of the 'Reds' is recounted, including their summary executions oftheir more honorable comrades. The work is illustrated with photographs of thestrung-up bodies of the Said leaders, also of a housewife condemned as an RSIsupporter being led by grinning partisans to her execution. (It also appears inCervi's Album, p. 284.)

Two features of this fifty-year-old mystery are of special interest to De Felice:the fate of the correspondence and the diary, and the question of Mussolini'sunexpected execution. It was by.the unraveling of these 'knotty questions' thathe hoped to demonstrate not only the hypocrisy of the vulgata, but the anti-because-non-Italian source of the legend of how the Duce met his end.

In no other aspect of Rosso e Nero does the historian's canon of a 'scientifichabitus' give way to a historiography of national redemption:

The Mussolini question in today's Italy should be a matter for historicalspecialists. But the opposite has happened: Italy's historians continue to goround and round the Mussolini problem without ever wishing to face it headon, resolving it once and for all. Hence the field lies open, exposed to raidingparties of journalists, enthusiasts, collectors, merchandisers, antiquarians.

(p. 135)

Of Mussolini's lost diaries there have been several, all of which De Felice sawat a glance to be fakes. So often have these forgeries shown up that if a genuine

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document ever materializes it will be hard to convince the public that it isauthentic. He appeals to anyone who has one to turn it in (pp. 135—7).

Having described the untenable speculations of others (pp. 137-42), DeFelice concludes that the diary is very likely to exist, probably 'in some secretAmerican archive'. One version has it that it was carried off to Switzerland bythe fleeing Japanese ambassador, and destroyed with the rest of the embassy fileswhen Japan surrendered. This does not mean no copies were made. It beingstrange that Ambassador Hidaka was not tried with his colleagues for war crimes,De Felice asks whether this leniency was in return for his handing over evidenceof the democracies' willingness to do business with the Fascist dictator (pp.142-3).

It is the Mussolini-Churchill papers, however, that might end once and forall a half-century of ideology posing as history, revealing Allied, especiallyBritish, willingness, perhaps even after the invasion of France, to deal with thetyrant. It is here also that Rosso e Nero's thesis has infuriated some, therebyobscuring the patriotic spirit of De Felice's life work.

Because Roosevelt did not wish to limit the trial of war criminals toGermans, the American armed forces and the OSS were ordered to takeMussolini alive. That they were more 'inept' than their British partners mayaccount for their failure to carry out this assignment. For Churchill, however,the dictator was an embarrassment. His end was to be less juridically formal. Asto which 'Tom, Dick or Harry' pulled the trigger, De Felice cares not a whit. Itwas an incident that has consumed an enormous quantity of newsprint, one thatnot even so resourceful investigator of things political as Bocca thinks will everbe solved, nor is it one worth moralizing over. For Bocca, it was an act to beexpected of a revolutionary era (p. 336).

For De Felice, it is crucial to track down the person who gave the killer theorder. He concluded, on the basis of what evidence we have from witnesses, thatit was 'an agent of the English secret services, an Italian by origin, who urgedthem [the partisans] to move quickly to wrap up the Mussolini business, as if tosay, "Look here, if the Allies get here in time, they'll snatch him away from you,the way the Armistice wants i t" ' (pp. 144-5).

In this way the incriminating correspondence may have ended in someLondon archive. As for the agent's identity, it was not hard to guess that DeFelice, though offering no proof, had pointed to Massimo (Max) Salvadori, bornin London in 1909 but educated since boyhood in Italy where he was in theanti-Fascist underground, was arrested, interrogated and released, eventuallyleaving Italy and joining the exile resistance Justice and Liberty group. Duringthe war, Salvadori served as an officer in the British Special Services, rising to therank of lieutenant-colonel. He was with the Allies at Salerno and Anzio,dropped behind the German lines into Tuscany as liaison with the partisans,then on to Milan where he was operating when Mussolini was executednearby.5

Salvadori's war was the 'expiation' of a lifelong enemy of the dictatorship

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aware of the opposition's failure to weaken the system. He becomes also DeFelice's appropriate historian-antagonist. In Rosso e Nero, the yean 1943—5 werethose of civil war, a destruction of the" nation's identity. Salvadori's Breve storiadella Resistenza italiana is a saga of liberation from tyranny, a return to liberal Italyand a catalogue of its heroes, patriots moved solely by dictates of conscience, bydevotion to Italy's liberal traditions, their individual virtues not to be obscuredby ideological labels. Salvadori defined his own politics as those of a 'liberal', inthe generic philosophical sense. Though he fought side by side with Com-munists, he reminds his readers that Stalin betrayed the Polish Resistance. OnFascism as a 'consensus', he grants that, prior to the Allied invasion, thedictatorship met with only feeble opposition. Most Italians were passive; manyactively supported the system. But the victory of 1943-4 was not merely a civilwar exploited by foreigners. The Resistance was a national resurrection,peninsula-wide: 'Croce in Naples, Bonomi in Rome, Parri in Milan.'6

Whereas in Rosso e Nero one finds moments of historical melancholia, as if tosay that destiny had not intended Italy ever to become a genuine nationalcommunity, that the best it offered was perhaps the ventennio, for Salvadori,Fascism was, as Croce had insisted, a 'parenthesis', a gap that was closed whenItaly recovered its traditional freedoms:

Within the CLN there was an Italy worthy of its finest traditions, capable ofmoving forward, looking serenely to the future; an Italy in which there wasalive, not as rhetoric but as action, those Italians who fought an emperor in1176, and were victorious; and in 1248 another; who fought in Florence in1530, at Siena in 1555, at Rome and Venice in 1849.7

Salvadori wrote that 'patriotism and anti-Fascism are one and the samething'.8 It is not De Felice's notion of the patriot. Yet, these two so opposingvisions of Salo, more fundamentally of Italy's modern history, have in commonthe abhorrence of conventional political labels. In Salvadori, clerics, monarchistslike Croce, Socialists, Communists and military — conspicuously General PrinceGonzaga, personally executed by a German fellow officer for obeying thecommand of 8 September 1943 to lay down arms — are gathered up in thepartisan-historian's celebration of his patria.

De Felice's heroes will offend all who live by the vulgata. Yet they are chosen,like Salvadori's liberators, in keeping with their existential singularity, notbecause of any mundane allegiance or merely prudential wisdom.

Rosso e Nero has three such exemplars: Alfredo Pizzoni, on the side of the'Reds', and two 'Blacks': Giovanni Gentile, so-called 'philosopher of Fascism',and Junio Valerio Borghese, in postwar Italy dubbed the 'Black Prince' inrecognition of his attempts to overthrow the First Republic. To this Italiantriad, De Felice adds a passing reference to a kindred American spirit, EzraPound, in part to show foreign support for Salo, whose war Pound defended,but also due to the poet's own claim to be the defender of a genuine 'America',its virtues betrayed by politicians in the service, not of the patria, but of the

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British Empire. Save for Pound's explanatory monomania that discovered onesource of the degeneration in the Jews — Dc Felice repeating his conviction thatanti-Semitism in any 'racial' sense was foreign to Italian civilization — poet andhistorian write as the voice of their homeland.

Pizzoni, World War I veteran, legionnaire with D'Annunzio at Fiume,joined the Resistance according to De Felice so that Italy would not be left inthe hands of those Fascists who were responsible for the German alliance, andwhat De Felice will concede was a 'catastrophe': the invasion of France (p. 91).Pizzoni became the financial genius of the CLN, and was also much admired bythe British — he had studied at Oxford. But his independence was such that as thevulgata took shape, his name was placed under a damnatio memoriae, the Reds'version of excommunication, only recently to be restored to history's pages byResistance veteran, later Senator, Leo Valiani. De Felice quotes from Pizzoni'sdiary, recently published, which is contemptuous of his Resistance colleagueswho were shortly to be among the political notables of the First Republic (pp.88-9).

Pizzoni, not as excommunicated as De Felice believes, is included inSalvadori's catalogue of liberators. Few, however, will find Borghese worthy ofsuch recognition. Yet it is central to De Felice's interpretation of Said that itforms a post-Fascist chapter of a specifically Italian history. If Pizzoni, a formerfollower of D'Annunzio, joined the Reds in defense of the patria, against all itsenemies, Borghese belongs in the same company. 'It is difficult to consider JunioValerio Borghese a Fascist. He was not even enrolled in the party', De Felicereminds us (p. 128). It is when reading Borghese's account of his wartimeadventures9 as a commander of the Decima Mas (X-Mas), the Tenth Fleet oftorpedo boats, pocket submarines and frogmen who went out to sink the Britishfleet, in operations that ranged from Gibraltar to the Black Sea, that one sees thesignificance for De Felice of this defender of the nation's identity against allcomers.

Like De Felice, Borghese saw the armistice of 8 September as a betrayal,hinting at a plot of politicians to subvert the nation. De Felice wrote

Prince Borghese would have obeyed the king, and would even have foughtthe Germans, if only Badoglio had seen to it that Italy come out of the warwith its head high. He explains all this in his memoirs: for a people militarydefeat is but a material scar. But to lose, with the contempt of a betrayed ally,also that of the victors before whom one humbles oneself in order to reach anagreement, is a moral scar whose traces remain for centuries.

(p. 128)

The armistice found the crews of the X-Mas strewn here and there across thepeninsula. De Felice speaks of their joyous reunions, the sort of camaraderie ofthe Said years that suggests what Italy might have become had a leader ofcomparable national devotion arisen. The hypocrisy of the invaders, bearers ofhumiliation and democracy, was plain in their effort to exploit the X-Mas and its

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commander. Borghese was protected from partisan vengeance by the Americanagent, later CIA Rome station chief, James Jesus Angleton. The Americanswanted to use the X-Mas 'hogs' — guided torpedoes — against the Japanese. Withregard to Salo's rounding up of Jews to be sent off to the camps, while this didtake place, De Felice reminds us that the British used one of the 'hogs' to sink aship carrying arms out of Yugoslavia to the Palestine Jews (pp. 131—2).

Borghese describes the disgraceful conduct of Italy's army, the ragged foot-soldiers with only one marching order: 'Tutti a casa.' He tells of an officer whocould not wait until the Allies landed at Anzio, so that he might surrenderwithout having to fight — not like the Germans who fell back in perfect order asif on the parade ground. During the war, Borghese visited Admiral Doenitz'snaval units in France. He noted how democratic they were, officers and men asocial unit. Was Germany not also faced with the disgrace of defeat? Borghesequotes a German he met in 1942 while on his Axis tour, who told him theyknew the war even then could not be won. Defeat was inevitable. It was thepatriot's duty to fight, die, never surrender.10

When a German historian published a sympathetic account of the Wehr-tnacht's last stand in Poland, a defense of the local German element from Sovietvengeance, De Felice defended his author from the accusation of being aNational Socialist apologist.11 Similarly, Borghese is said to have been ready todefend northeastern Italy from German annexationist plans. De Felice grantsthat during the postwar he became a 'reactionary', also 'politically foolish' (pp.128-33).

In Borghese's memoirs, his 'Sailor's Decalogue' is a platform for conspira-torial activity in defense of a betrayed patria on the eve of the 1948 elections,when he prepared a plot to block a Communist victory that never materialized.The party, whatever Stalin's plans for it, as De Felice's account of the RedBrigades shows, had become a de facto player in the game of parliamentarypolitics. In frustration, Borghese organized a coup d'itat — a fiasco. He died inSpanish exile in 1974, where his father had served as Italian ambassador, andwhere he had fought the Reds during the Civil War.

Bocca's Borghese is another person: conspirator, camp-follower, chief of theRSI's most murderous units, whose memoirs falsify the armistice as a bolt fromthe blue, a new stab-in-the-back legend. The order to lay down arms was givenhim by the Badoglio regime. Instead, on 12 September the X-Mas became partof the Wehrmacht. For Mussolini, Borghese had little use. He founded adissident journal, L'Orizzonte, for which Preziosi wrote. Preziosi had intro-duced Hitler to Italians back in 1922, and remained a Hitler favorite. As featuredin Cervi's Album (pp. 251, 256), L'Orizzonte featured caricatures of black GIs,cartoons that would reappear after the war. Salo closed the journal, not becauseof racism, but because it showed how chaotic the RSI had become. Borghesethen plotted with German officers to attack Salo. When it was evident Germanywas finished, he and other RSI leaders tried to cut a deal with the Resistance,then with the Allies, offering the X-Mas to contain Tito's partisans, an offer

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Bocca shows to have been turned down due to the unit's evil repute amongAnglo-American military (pp. 278—83, 323—5).

In Rosso e Nero, Borghese is an idealist whose 'vision of the world' eludespolitical classification. If his bands tortured and executed partisans, it was toavenge their victims, but above all because the Resistance, linked to the Alliedforces, had plunged Italy into a civil war that the 'Black Prince1 was committedto preventing, fighting solely for the 'nation's honor', for Italy's historic identity(pp. 129, 133).

It is the last Italian potential de Gaulle, Giovanni Gentile, who bestexemplifies De Felice's own vision of national leaders. In textbooks, Gentile isthe 'philosopher of Fascism'. The fact that he drafted the party's 'Doctrine' mayhave created the impression that someone with Mussolini's instincts for what ittook to get and to hold power was interested in anything so expendable as an'idea' or an 'idealist'. That Gentile was instrumental in bringing his colleaguesinto line behind the Fascist Oath is true. That only eleven, mainly academics, ledby Croce, refused did much to convince academics in democratic countries12

that, as Chabod noted, dictatorship was what Italians needed. But Gentile wasalso involved in the creation of the Entidopedia italiana, to which many anti-Fascists contributed. Chabod's entries are models of the kind.

Historians beguiled by sociology's 'elective affinities', or the once-fashionable 'idea history', would find Fascism's 'origins' in Gentile's 'idealismoattuale', a philosophy of the spirit as pure act set forth back in 1912 by hisPalermo School of Philosophy. For a 'liberation' from such explanations, alsofrom the irony of propagating the regime's claim that it was a 'spiritual' and not a'materialistic' revolution, a nonsense Mussolini found rhetorically useful, onemay read the long and epistemologically enlightening Croce-Gentile corre-spondence,13 from 1894 to the rupture brought about, not by the longstandingdifferences over Hegelian logic, but by Gentile's use of his position to rewardand punish colleagues.14

For Croce, Vico's verum-zs-factum was Hegelian dialectics already purged ofthat teleologicalpanhgism which, as Croce insisted, 'gobbled up' history's recordof man's fare. Gentile's 'idealism' spoke of the spirit's transcendent power, as anundifferentiated 'One', rejecting Croce's 'facts' as an extra-mental something.Gentile's Lpensiero italiano del Rinascimento (1920) may be read for his pneumaticstyle, capturing the monism of his heroes, Bruno and the still-Platonist Galileo.Croce would later describe this exaltation of spiritual oneness as 'pietiner surplace',15 mind revolving about itself, what Gentile defined as autoctisi.

De Felice describes Gentile's relations with Fascism as 'up and down' (p.125). Even before World War II, Gentile's reforms as Minister of Education hadbeen cast aside as politically inexpedient.16 At the fourteenth National Philo-sophical Congress, held in Florence in October 1940, Gentile was a marginalfigure, also an embarrassment. Giuseppe Bottai, Minister of National Education,opened the assembly with a speech warning those who did not grasp acceptableFascist philosophy.17 Prominent Thomist speakers,18 hostile to Gentile, whose

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anti-Aristotelian Neoplatonism was anathema, also out of place since theLateran Accords, left no doubt as to the dissident nature of the one-time'philosopher of Fascism'. Since 1926, Gentile's view of 'religion' and the statehad been anti-Catholic. A 'religion of the patria'19 had to square with theAccords. It was just this national apolitical devotion, neither Red nor Black,that is important for Rosso t Nero's defense of Gentile; whose own address to theCongress, however, made clear the anti-Fascist implications of Croce's so-calledidealism.20

Gentile's 'attualismo' was always politically militant, as was evident in his1914 Sommario di pedagogia come scienza jilosojka. His World War I patrioticsermons, collected as Guerra efede, Fratnmentipolitici (1919), are a 'war is what theSpirit makes it' rhetoric:

The idea of war is not in prius with respect to war as it is in effect. It is bornwith war itself as that idealization or awareness in which it acquires reality;since the war that is fought is war as war is, real, living war, not like some factto be learned, but as an act of our spirit, like our will itself, our thought, ourfeelings, in short like that life we are eternally living.

(p. 9)

Gentile's closeness to Croce was not ended by the latter's advice that Italyshould remain neutral, still within the Triple Alliance, since the parliament wasoverwhelmingly opposed to war, as was Giolitti, five times former Premier,21

Croce's generation's symbol of political accommodation. Though the 'inter-ventisti' labeled Croce a Germanophile, even a traitor, and Mussolini called him'an intellectual draft-dodger', as would later anti-Fascists — so history's cunningwould have it - Gentile in that war did not question his friend's patriotism.

As for Mussolini's second war, this one of his own doing, if Rosso e Nerosingles out the by then marginal figure in the Fascist camp as a potential deGaulle, it is Gentile's non-partisan celebration of sacrifice, of martyrdom, thatappeals to De Felice, whose own last statement is itself a sermon to his people.De Felice refers to Gentile's address from the Capitol in Rome on 23 June, onthe eve of the defenestration, as a call for closing ranks, admitting the short-comings of the ventennio, but striking out against any notion that the country wasin a state of civil war (p. 124). The speech called upon the nation to will victory.Gentile appealed to 'Fascists and non-Fascists'. The Revolution of 1922, likeMussolini's 1914—15 campaign for intervention, had brought glory to Italy. Thephilosopher excoriated the tepid, the opportunists, the faint-hearted who werethe problem of all 'great revolutions': the state, creator of the nation; Fascism,which redeemed the victory of 1918 from the 'usurping bullies of Versailles';England, the tyrant to be defeated; the death of parliamentarism, an achieve-ment of the Fascist ages, and so forth.22

Reconciliation was not to include any quarter when it came to those whowould undermine Said. In the Rome speech and in newspaper articles, Gentilecalled for death to the traitors, which, to Bocca (pp. 218—19), meant simply war

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to the death against the Resistance as a whole. But that Gentile was prepared tosacrifice his life for the RSI and Italy was clear. The RSI's Minister of Education,Carlo Alberto Biggini, Rector of the University of Pisa when his colleague wasdirector of its famed Scuola Normale, proposed Gentile to Mussolini as head ofSaid's Academy, a post he accepted at a time when the war was lost. Whatremained of defense of the peninsula depended on German arms. On 19 March1944 in Florence, by which time partisans were active in Tuscany, Gentile gavehis inaugural address. It was the bicentennial of Vico's death, a moment to callforth those talents that had become Gentile's second nature:

For this Italy we who are now old have lived. Of it, we have ever spoken toour young, assuring them that it is always present in their hearts and minds,and hence it is immortal. For it, if need be, we would die; because without itwe would not know what to make of this miserable wreckage.23

On 15 April still unidentified assassins killed Gentile. De Felice, amongothers, cites an article by the Communist and classical scholar ConcettoMarchetti, calling for the death of Gentile and other 'German lackeys' as anincitement to the partisans. He refers to Marchetti as a 'Stalinist-Latinist' (p.125). Bocca finds any lament among intellectuals as at best disingenuous, Gentilehaving demanded the same end for the partisans. Indro Montanelli, Cervi'ssometime collaborator and like him a veteran of the Fascist military, has writtenoff this mystery to the work of random seekers after fame. Others absolveMarchetti, pointing out that he was not the author of the call for Gentile's death,and that in any case there had been recent executions of partisans in Florencethat called for some reprisal. 4 De Felice returns to the 'British agent' episode inthe death of Mussolini, asking whether it was not from London that theelimination of the spokesman for national defense was planned (p. 126).

Gentile's martyrdom was his glory. De Felice's inclusion of Ezra Pound,Anglophobe, anti-imperialist enemy of 'Roosevelt's war', reflects his owndisgust at Allied hypocrisy, a masquerade of imperial interests as a war againsttyrants with whom the conquerors were only too happy to deal. The Poundentry is the expression of De Felice's appreciation for a patriot, like himselfdepressed by his country's loss of amor patrio. It was this embittered patriotismthat led Pound to defend the ventennio, and then Salo. It is evident from thepoet's Italian writings that he never thought his acts were treasonous, any morethan Rosso e Nero was conceived as a defense of the Axis or of dictatorship perse.As for Pound, he had no interest in Italy. His thoughts, when not on matters ofaesthetics, were directed always to his homeland, created by his hero, JohnAdams, and then despoiled by Anglophile warmongers, Wilson, then Roose-velt, by bankers, usurers, most visibly — though not exclusively —Jews.

Prior to Salo, Fascism took little interest in Pound. Then, in 1943, it enlistedhim as a contributor to the RSI's Edizioni Popolari, reprinting a 1931 interviewby the poet's admirer, Francesco Menotti, initially in the short-lived (1929-31)review Belvedere. Pound was introduced to Salo loyalists as the enemy of

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'democratic goldocracy', anticipating Fascism's slogan 'Blood versus Gold',now, in the final struggle, prophet of a Fascist victory that could 'restore ancientcivic virtues, the only possible alternative to world domination by bankers, byRothschild and Shylock'.25

The RSI anthology, as it moves from 1931 to 1944, reveals the poet'sawareness of his confused mental state; also his denial of anti-Semitism. 'I can'tconvince myself, he wrote, 'that the Jew suffers more than the Aryan'; adding:'The Jews have enough trouble of their own. It's not necessary to charge themwith sins they have not committed. But they lack a sense of State.'26

Gentile's world of the 'pure spirit' never located modernity's 'wreckage' inanything as mundane as Jews. Yet his message was the same: 'It is not nationalitythat creates the State, rather the State that creates the nation.'27 In Pound'sJefferson and/or Mussolini (1935) John Adams is the state's migliorfabbro. In 1944,Salo published an Italian version of Pound's 1935 work, updated to dwell onRoosevelt, also Pound's Gesellian monetary theory, designed to preventinflation and gold hoarding.28 Mussolini is praised for closing the press, instru-ment of politicians. Wilson's 1917 war 'betrayed America', serving instead thedictates of the Protocols of the Elders qfZion.29

Bocca cites an order to Biggini to expand circulation of the Edizioni Popolari(p. 221). Pound contributed UAmerica, Roosevelt e le cause deltaguerra presente, afarrago of 'America betrayed', Bank of England, 'usocracy', the illegitimateHamilton, 'likely a Jew', a few kind words for Lindbergh, Marx, Henry Wallaceand Charles Beard's interpretation of the constitution, and a list of anti-Semiticliterature. Pound also wrote for Crodata Italica, a Farinacci organ, a 'mixture ofCatholicism and ultra-Fascism', Cervi calls it (pp. 235—36), run by a priest whofound no incompatibility between his faith and the extermination camps.

Farinacci, the priest and thousands more died in the war of Reds and Blacks.Preziosi was 'unable to live with defeat' and committed suicide with his wife.And Pound? While unable to grasp how hatred of a mere government wastreasonous, he was tried and committed to a hospital for the insane, there to bevisited by fellow poets, one of whom has left an account of his genial anddemented moments.31 Postwar Salo veterans had more impressive versions ofAnglo-American perfidy in Charles Tansill's Back Door to War.22 But Pound wasnot forgotten, as Rosso e Nero shows. He returned to Italy in 1958, greeted bythose bitter in defeat, resentful of the victors' presence. Claudio Mutti, Italianspecialist in the Protocols — of which there were eleven major editions, 1921—78,that of 197233 designed to include John XXIII as a Zionist agent — reprinted theSalo edition of Pound's On Money.M

Pound insisted that Fascism was always anti-Jew, complaining that Romeprior to 1938 ignored the extent of the menace. The Racial Laws changed that,a subject Rosso e Nero leaves to the last.

In De Felice's history of Fascism and the Jews,35 the familiar explanation ofthe Racial Laws as needed to give the Axis an ideological basis was shown to be,as again in Rosso e Nero (p. 156), false; not because De Felice's portrayal of the

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ventennio as a 'consensus' was in any sense a defense of Fascist anti-Semitism; butsimply because the records, combed with such care, admitted no such thesis. ButDe Felice would distinguish racial fanatics like Preziosi from the community ofpure patriots who served Salo so that Italy as a people would survive the war.Those who were by nature evil represent a mentality foreign to the Italian spirit.De Felice had always favored a fashionable postwar 'History of ideas' thatlocated a specifically 'German culture', from which Nazism flowered, anoudook hostile to 'western values'.36 "When, in 1992, anti-Jewish vandalismworried Italy's leaders, De Felice was called upon to address a gathering presidedover by the President of the Republic. He said that Italy and the Italians wereresistant to such a foreign culture due to the legacy of Mazzini, apostle of a worldof the nations, thanks also to humanistic values that were Italy's historicachievement.37

There are echoes in Rosso e Nero of this effort to lift the burden of a'Germanic' barbarity from Italy's history. 'National ideals', as De Felice definedthem, 'are not to be interpreted in the manner of the nationalism from Bismarckto Hitler' (pp. 104-6). Works on the treatment of Jews that emphasize theGerman-Italian contrast are cited (pp. 158, 161).38 Therefore the Italianmeasures of 1938

do not authorize us to draw the conclusion that Fascism and Nazismconstituted a single phenomenon. The two legislations have certainly pointsin common. However, the spirit and the culture that inspired them and thepractical development of the two policies are quite different. . . . Thecategory 'Nazifascism' was invented by political propaganda in order todefeat a common enemy. It was an invention of the Allies during the war,taken up by the Resistance as a password, from whence it became part ofcommon speech, and so to our own day.

(pp. 157-8)

Not racism, nor any ideology, but instead a shift from a philo-Zionist anti-British policy to courtship of Arab nationalists accounts for the 1938 enactments(pp. 154—7), an explanation consistent with Gli ebrei italiani sotto ilfasdsmo,39 towhich theme De Felice devoted a separate study, Ufasdsmo e I'Oriente. Arabi,ebrei, italiani nella politico di Mussolini (1988). Prior to this policy change, a smalltraining station for Italian Zionist militants, often followers of Jabotinsky'saggressive tactics, was set up at Civitavecchia. Transit of Jews, refugees fromCentral Europe, to Palestine via Trieste was facilitated. It was an exploitation ofthe 'Jewish question' that exposed Italy's Jews to the fortunes and policies of theregime, as 1938 would show. Italian Zionists who worked to promote Arab-Jewish reconciliation in the Middle East, notably the Resistance hero EnzoSereni, opposed Fascist philo-Zionism.40

A note in Rosso e Nero (p. 26, n. 6) refers to a study of the Racial Lawspublished by the Milan Center for the Documentation of ContemporaryJewish History which discounts De Felice's 'German racism — Italian pragmatic

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anti-Semitism'; also the related folkloristic italiani bravagente, a people incapable- as it is once more being said41 - of doing things 'Germans' do. In it, the author,emulating De Felice's 'scientific habitus', recorded the day-by-day, hour-by-hour drafting of the 1938 laws, the bureaucracy's feverish compilation of anew Jewish census, the archival record of Mussolini's penonal hand in makingthe Jews a separate people.42

It was not the 'Nazi-Fascism' of the victors and then the Resistance's vulgatathat would become part of postwar historiography, but instead Rosso e Nero'sown Germanic-Italic distinction, this largely due to the Ludwig biography ofthe Duce. Ludwig had courted Mussolini since 1926. The Italian edition of theGerman text of his Talks with Mussolini, carefully edited by the Duce,43 in whichFascism's benevolence toward Jews was prominent, would be one of Mussolini'smost effective propaganda efforts in the democracies. Ludwig became aspecialist in the 'Germany vs. Western Humanism' tradition.44 Some noted theirony of substituting Germans for Jews as a menace. Others recalled Ludwig as aveteran Pangermanist now urging Americans to teach morality to the Germanpeople.4 Postwar students of the exile movement associated him with efforts toinfluence American foreign policy. Ludwig advised the Allied Military Govern-ment to keep a tight rein on the Germans' dangerous predispositions. Germananti-Hitlerians reacted.46

As De Felice sees it, if there were traces of Italian race theory, it was due tothe regime's worry about race mixing in the colonies (pp. 155-6). As for Jews,De Felice asks readers to imagine Hitler's physical intimacy with them, whereasin Mussolini's case there were two: Sarfatti and Angelica Balabanov (p. 153).Sarfatti wrote her own biography of the Duce. Balabanov in exile tried tocounter the widespread notion that Fascism was not a genuine dictatorship.47

De Felice does not question Mussolini's knowledge of the treatment ofEurope's Jews. He kept track of his ally's control of Poland, in part by means ofthe Italian wife of a Polish diplomat who between 1940 and 1942 visitedoccupied Poland, thanks to a diplomatic pass expedited by Ciano's office. Toldthat Warsaw's Jews, despite persecution, acted as middlemen between theGestapo and non-Jews, he remarked: 'Now there's a race that always managesto stay afloat. They're doing fairly well, then . . . elastic, like rubber balls.'48

During the extermination phase, pressed by Ribbentrop to hand over Italy'sJews, Mussolini resisted. It was a matter of a last shred of sovereignty. Informedof transports out of France, and of the fate of the Berlin community, he said:'They are making them emigrate . . . to another world' (pp. 158—9).

Bocca's account of Salo and the Jews is to the point: Jews were enemies,siding with the invaders, treated accordingly. Still, RSI chieftains kept their'protected Jews', hoping to escape the expected vengeance (pp. 203-10).

Italiani brava gente? De Felice would like to believe it; only at the close ofRosso e Nero to draw back from Volkerpsychologie, an example of that historio-graphical Kitsch from which he had set out to protect his profession. Moreover,if by nature 'good', compared to a people who are given to evil, 'good' then for

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what? To be at best pasticdoni, incapable of being terribly bad, perhaps also ofdoing much that was of great historical significance (pp. 161—2).

Was Italy a failed historical experiment? De Felice insists Italy felt the crisis ofthe 1943-5 civil war as had no other nation (p. 22), suggesting that what hadbeen done, from Cavour to Giolitti, could not overcome history's burden.Much in Rosso e Nero reflects the pessimism of other patriot-historians whobrooded over the ultimate source of their country's defeat: Meinecke's Diedeutsche Katastrophe (1940), with its return to the pre-unitarian Gcethezeit; orBloch's L'Étrange Défaite (1940), the resistance hero's explanation of the 1940collapse as the legacy of a worn-out culture, unable to withstand the youthfulvigor of Hitler's armies. Was it also Italy's destiny? The 'consensus' thesis leavesopen the question as to whether there was a pre-Fascist viable political entity, asCroce, Chabod and Salvadori insist; all of them would agree that there was'consensus', in as much as the old bureaucracy remained in place. Liberation,however, for the liberal school, showed that Italians wished to return to theparliamentary era the dictatorship had destroyed.49

Rosso e Nero cites a heated exchange between Parri and Croce, Parri denyinga pre-Fascist liberal Italy, certainly a democratic one. That it was not a 'completedemocracy' De Felice agrees. That 'democracy' came to Italy 'ready made' inthe baggage trains of foreigners and their Resistance backers, as the vulgatawould have it, he flatly rejects. Was the 'First Republic', then, with its'imperfect bipartisanship', a shâm, a new version of trasfomtismol

It is too early to think of offering a final judgment as to the options andcontradictions of that time. Much remains to be studied. However, one thingI would like to say: to De Gasperi must be credited the great merit of havingcarried over the idea of democracy that was gaining ground in twentieth-century Italy — roughly speaking before and after the Great War — an ideaFascism with its revolution first defeated, then trampled underfoot.

(pp. 68, 75-6)

It is in that 'carried over' that De Felice, whose life's work has becomefundamental for all students of twentieth-century Italy and Europe, acknow-ledges the liberal historiographical tradition.

Notes

1 Fabio Andriola, Mussolini-Churchill: Carteggio segreto (Casale Monferrato, 1996).2 A reference to François Furet, Le Passé d'une illusion: essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe

siècle (Paris, 1995).3 Federico Chabod, L'Italia contemporanea (1918-1948), 9th edn (Turin, 1961), p . 82.4 Ezio Saini, La notte ai Dongo (Rome, 1950), passim.5 For Salvadori's biography, see the 'Notizia introduttiva' and the 'Prefazione' by his

partisan comrade Riccardo Bauer, in Salvadori, Breve storia della Resistenza italiana(Florence, 1974), pp. v-viii, ix-xvii.

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6 Salvadori, Breve storia, pp. 36-7, 41-8, 76-8, 230-1. For Salvadori's undergroundmemoirs, Resistenza ed azione (Bari, 1951).

7 Salvadori, Breve storia, p. 126.8 ibid., pp. 81-9.9 Junio Valerio Borghese, Decima flottiglia Mas. Dalle origini all'armistizio (Milan, 1952).

MAS: Motoscafo-anti-sommergibile, developed in World War I, given then the'Roman' motto by D'Annunzio, 'Memento Audere Semper'.

10 Borghese, Decima flottiglia Mas, pp. 261-2, 318-50, 345-50.11 Andreus Hillgruber, 'Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 als Problem der

deutschen Nationalgeschichte und der europäischen Geschichte', in his Zweierleiuntergang. Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende der europäischen Judentums(Berlin, 1986), pp. 11-74. For De Felice's comment, 'Fu Hitler a mandare Hess inInghilterra', L'Espresso, 18 October 1987, p. 195.

12 Howard Marraro, Nationalism in Italian Education (New York, 1927). On Marraro's1934 talks with Gentile and other praise of Fascism, Giuseppe Ricuperati, 'Per unastoria dell'università italiana da Gentile a Bottai: appunti e discussione', in L'Universitàtra Otto e Novecento: I modelli europei e il caso italiano, ed. Ilaria Porciani (Naples, 1994),pp. 369-71.

13 B. Croce, Lettere a Giovanni Gentile (1896-1924), ed. Alda Croce (Milan, 1981); G.Gentile, Lettere a Benedetto Croce, ed. Giovanni Gentile Foundation for PhilosophicalStudies, 5 vols (Florence, 1972-90), pp. 369-71.

14 Croce, Lettere, n. 987 (13 May 1924), p. 669.15 B. Croce, 'Un fallito tentativo di riforma dello Hegelismo. L'Idealismo attuale',

Quad. de 'La critica' 4(11) (1948): 101. For the story of the Croce-Gentile dialogue,see this author's 'History as logic and as imagination', in F. J. Coppa (ed.) Studies inModem Italian History (New York, Berne, Frankfurt am Main, n.d.), pp. 245-71.

16 Ricuperati, 'Per una storia', for the Gentile reforms and their fate.17 R. Istituto di Studi Filosofici, Atti del XIV Congresso nazionale di filosofia, Florence, 2 -

25 October 1940-XVIII (Milan, 1941), pp. 1-25.18 Emilio Ugania, 'L'attualismo e il platonismo nei confronti dell'ontologismo e nel

netomismo', ibid., pp. 389-419.19 Gentile, 'Il problema religioso in Italia', Fascismo e cultura. Biblioteca di Cultura Politica,

ed. Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura (Milan, 1928), pp. 146-81.20 Gentile, 'Di alcuni caratteri della più recente filosofia italiana', Atti del XIV Congresso,

pp.469-81.21 Croce, Lettere, 13 and 17 May 1915, pp. 493, 494.22 G. Gentile, Discorso agli italiani tenuto in Campidoglio il 24 giugno 1943, XXI (n.p., n.d.)

(23 June in Rosso e Nero, p. 124).23 From Carlo Alberto Biggini, Ciovanni Gentile. Discorso pronunciato alla radio il 23 aprile

XXII (Venice, 1944), pp. 6-7.24 Sergio Bertelli, 'Concetto Marchesi: non colpevole', La Nazione, 9 September 1995,

p. 3.25 Ezra Pound, Orientamenti (Vibo Valentia, 1978), reprint of the Venetian RSI edition

of September 1944, p. 7.26 ibid., p. 40 and passim.27 Biggini, Giovanni Gentile, p. 14, from Gentile, Memorie italiane (1936).28 Introduzione alla natura economica degli S.U.A. (Venice: Casa Editrice delle Edizioni

Popolari, 1944).29 Jefferson e Mussolini (Venice: Casa Editrice delle Edizioni Popolari, 1944), pp. 31-2,

43, 54-5, 84-5.30 L'America, Roosevelt e le cause della guerra presente (n.p., Casa editrice delle Edizioni

Popolari, 1944). pp. 231-2 and passim.

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31 Elizabeth Bishop, 'Visits to St. Elizabeth' (1950), in her Questions of Travel (NewYork, 1965), pp. 92-5.

32 Charles C. Tansill, Il gioco diplomatico tra le due guerre nei documents americani, trans. fromthe English and with a Preface by Giovanni Carpasso Torre (Rocca San Casciano,1955). Carpasso Torre was RSI Minister of Education and promoter of theAssociazione Italo-Germanica.

33 'I Protocolli' dei savi di Sion. La verità su Israele, i suoi piani, le sue mire rivelate da undocumente israelitico (Lucera, 1972).

34 Sulla moneta. Quademi del Veltro diretti da Claudio Mutti, II (Padua: Edizioni Ar, 1977).For Mutti, see his L'ebrairità e ebraismo (Padua: Edizioni Ar, 1976), his version of theProtocols.

35 Gli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin, 1961).36 ibid., p. 31.37 'Follia con la testa rasata', La Nazione (Florence), 25 November 1992.38 Léon Poliakov and Jacques Sabille, Gli ebrei sotto l'occupazione italiana (Milan, 1956).39 For the shift of policy, see chs IV-VI, pp. 185-392.40 D. Carpi, 'Le ultime lettere scambiate fra Enzo Sereni e Leone Carpi', in D. Carpi et

al. (eds) Scritti in memoria di Leone Carpi (Jerusalem, 1967), pp. 285-94. For Sereni onArabs and Jews, see E. Sereni and R. E. Ashery, Jews and Arabs in Palatine, Studies in aNational and Colonial Problem (New York, 1935). Sereni left Italy in 1927, returningduring the Resistance, dying in Dachau.

41 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (New York, 1996), pp. 390,408.

42 Michele Sarfatti, Mussolini contro gli ebrei. Cronaca dell'elaborazione delle leggi razziali(Turin, 1994).

43 Colloqui con Mussolini. Riproduzione delle bozze delle prima edizione con correzioniautografiche del Duce (Verona, 1950).

44 Emil Ludwig, Les Allemands. Double histoire d'une nation (New York, 1941).45 H. Arendt, 'Für and gegen Paul Tillich', Aufbau, 31 July 1942, p. 6.46 Emil Ludwig, Comment traiter les Allemands (New York: Ed. de la Maison Française,

1944). See, in reply, Richard Tungel, 'Emil Ludwig and Wir', Die Zeit, 7 March1946, p. 4.

47 A. Balabanov, 'In Italien war es nicht anders', Neue Volks-Zeitung (New York), 5September 1942, p. 8.

48 Luciana Frassati, Il destino passa per Varsavia (Rocca S. Casciano, 1949), p. 124. OnLudwig's 'Germans', p. 292. For the mysteries of the September 1943 armistice, pp.290-2. See De Felice's Preface to the second edition (Milan, 1985), pp. i-iv, for therelevance of the Frassati memoirs to Rosso e Nero's critique of the vulgata resistenziale.

49 Chabod, L'ltalia contemporanea, pp. 106-7, 142.

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