1. From the myth of La Resistenza to right-wing revisionism

Although it is perhaps surprising from a contemporary perspective, after 1945 Italian historical research and popular media devoted very little attention to exploring Fascism, concentrating instead on its antithesis, the antifascist resistance. Mussolini's dictatorship merely provided a backdrop for heroic portrayals of Italian freedom fighters. In this regard, Italy was no different from post-war France, where La Résistance française wholly overshadowed the country's Vichy past and collaboration with the German occupation.Footnote ¹ It was soon popular wisdom that the Italians had never really let themselves fall sway to Fascism; rather, they were first victims of Mussolini, and after 1943, victims of the Nazi occupation regime. In a remarkable consensus, conservatives, liberals and even Communists declared before the war's end that Fascism had been an unfortunate detour on the inexorable road to democracy, and, after the war, the disparities between Italian Fascism and National Socialism were continually emphasised.Footnote ² The actors at the time were pursuing two political goals: On the one hand, they hoped the Allied victors would be forgiving in their treatment of Italy. On the other hand, this narrative helped to establish a broad-based antifascist consensus and overcome the domestic tensions that had prevailed since 1943. Ultimately, this strategy was successful – and had far-reaching consequences. To this day most Italians are convinced that Mussolini's regime was a harmless dictatorship. In a 2002 survey, in fact, one-quarter of Italy's youth voiced a positive opinion of the Fascist regime. While the Italian population's embrace of this ‘self-fulfilling myth’ has been frequently described and maligned, to date little attention has been devoted to how this myth has distorted the perspectives and interpretations advanced by professional historians. I address this problem in greater detail in the final section of this review.

In the early 1970s the post-war myth of widespread popular resistance came under increasing criticism. However, in contrast to the situation in other western European countries, where such criticism was driven by left-wing forces,Footnote ³ in Italy this revisionism was a child of the right. The increasingly right-leaning historian Renzo De Felice advanced a narrative that helped to acquit the Italians of culpability. While De Felice acknowledged that the fascist regime had been supported by the majority of Italians over many years, he painted a picture of a predominantly benevolent regime that had done much for the welfare of the people while modernising the country, in sharp contrast to the purportedly regressive tendencies of National Socialism. It was a narrative that proved easy to adopt without critical examination, even for left-wing historians. And it also satisfied the desire of broad segments of the Italian population for a plausible explanation as to why open resistance took years to emerge, while simultaneously distancing Italy from Nazi Germany and its monumental crimes.

2. Between anti-revisionism and post-revisionism: New approaches, perspectives and findings

It took many years for this dominant and comforting interpretation to be called into question. In the five studies examined in this review, there is a clearly evident desire on the part of the authors to clarify the precise contours of their positions. Some authors, in fact, in addressing the subject focus almost solely on critiquing the right-wing revisionism of De Felice. Paul Corner in particular argues vehemently against the view that Fascism made considerable inroads into Italian society. For a scholar of National Socialism, this is a peculiar state of affairs. Here we find academics who least associate themselves with the political right casting doubt on the attractiveness of Fascism and the extent to which Italians voluntarily collaborated with the regime. In Germany such a thesis would quickly be attacked as an interpretation that ignores the lessons of the National Socialist experience. This highlights the alternate social and political frame within which historical research is conducted in Italy, and, by extension, the occasionally marked disparities between academic discourse in different countries.

Yet it is also surprising to observe the differences between the studies examined in this review in terms of underlying assumptions, methods, sources and findings. The most conventional study is by Paul Corner. It examines relationships between the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) and the Italian population, and is conventional in three respects: the first is its approach. In an intentional rejection of cultural history as a method of investigation, Corner, a British historian who has lived in Italy for many years, adopts a socio-historical perspective, thus affirming the approach that was dominant when he received his training in the 1970s. Corner takes a classic top-down approach: He attempts to show that the party failed to serve as a vehicle for currying mass support, and was not able to transport the ideology of the ruling elites in Rome to the provinces. Corner cites popular disapproval for the regime to conclude that the public rejected Fascism on the whole. He attempts to write a history of ‘real existing fascism’ (p. 6) that, in his view, consists of organisational structures that exist as hard facts.

In terms of sources, Corner almost exclusively uses official government documents. Opinion data play an important role: Corner presents local surveys of public opinion conducted by the party and government agencies as well as assessments drafted by informants – which, indeed, point to a strong rejection of the party and its representatives from the mid 1930s onward. Corner thus attempts to answer how the public reacted to Fascism in an indirect manner, as the opinion data only pertain the regime itself, and not to Fascism as an ideology. Corner does not draw on the diaries, letters or memoirs of ‘ordinary Italians’, as these are considered by Corner to be non-representative. Here, we find an unmitigated trust in the descriptions of reality contained in official documents, which Corner relies on to provide an overall picture of public opinion. This is somewhat surprising, for recent research has shown that even serial sources such as witness reports are not reliable indicators of general sentiment in a city or region.Footnote ⁴ Yet Corner gives much credit to individual informants, who said to know what ‘the Piedmontese people’ thought (p. 190). An additional weakness is that the reports used by Corner do not survey all parts of Italian society. Rather, they focus on segments of society viewed as potentially dangerous, such as the working classes. The elites who served to perpetuate the power of the regime are thus ignored, as has been acknowledged by Corner following publication of the study.Footnote ⁵ Corner does mention the immense apparatus of new para-governmental organisations that arose alongside the party (pp. 162–7), explaining that this apparatus was comparatively efficient and offered a developing middle class previously unknown opportunities for advancement. Yet it is quite unfortunate that he does not address the question of how Fascism managed to win the allegiance of the people through these new organisations. In short, the material used by Corner is perhaps much less representative that he presumes, meaning that the applicability of his conclusions may be limited. In other words, the extent to which the ‘real existing fascism’ described by Corner was actually ‘real’ remains to be seen.

An additional conventional aspect of Corner's study is the assumption that one can draw a clear line of separation between ‘real fascists’ and ‘the population’. It appears that for Corner, only those wearing Fascist uniforms were true Fascists. This is a dichotomy that also shaped research on National Socialism for a long time. However, such a perspective overlooks the fact that Fascism arose from the centre of Italian society. Corner ultimately comes to the somewhat unsurprising conclusion that Fascism reached its limits at the gates of most Italian cities. According to Corner, the regime was never successful in establishing itself locally, as it was engaged in its own internal power struggles and was actually powerless to act, despite its enormous activism. For Corner, Fascism was doomed to fail, because its central vision of creating a new man was totally utopian (p. 21). With this apodictic conclusion, which comes at the very beginning of the study, Corner forgoes an immense opportunity to generate new insights. The fact that Fascism's highly racist vision was irredeemably utopian and unrealistic is actually not the real issue of interest. Rather, we should ask: what were the consequences of the ultimately failed effort of the regime to reshape the population and expand the Italian state, both on Italians and on foreigners impacted by this project? One simply cannot forget that over one million people died as a consequence of this vision – mostly in Africa, but also in the Balkans – in the wars of conquest and occupation waged by the Italian Fascist regime.

A quite similar argument is advanced by Maura E. Hametz in her work, which addresses the relationships between the regime, the judiciary and the Italian people. For Hametz, a historian based at Old Dominion University in Virginia, Italian Fascism was a monumental failure. Her main thesis is that nationalism, Catholicism, regional ties and the family were powerful vehicles of identity against which Fascist ideology was unable to make significant inroads. Without identifying it by name, Hametz expounds the ‘milieu thesis’, which was long used in Germany to account for the ostensibly reserved stance of German Catholics toward National Socialism.

Hametz explores the relationship of the Fascist regime to its citizens by investigating the local example of Trieste, a coastal region bordering Slovenia that was ceded to Italy in 1919 from the remains of Austria-Hungary. Trieste is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Italians, but is also home to a large Slovenian minority. Like other regions acquired from Austria – particularly South Tyrol – Trieste was subjected to a policy of forced Italianisation, including the violent suppression of local traditions and languages, for the purpose of ‘cultural cleansing’. At the centre of Hametz's study is the story of Luisa Paulovich, who filed a lawsuit at the beginning of the 1930s against the Italianisation of her Dalmatian family name and was ultimately vindicated by an Italian court.

Hametz draws a number of broad conclusions from this anecdotal evidence. For example, she asserts on this basis that the efforts of the regime to inculcate the judiciary with Fascist ideology failed to gain traction. Hametz even concludes that Italy somehow remained a state in which the rule of law prevailed. The title of her book has an argumentative purpose: Justice was not served in the name of the Fascist regime, but rather ‘In the Name of Italy’. Hametz asserts additionally that the episode revealed ‘cracks in the façade of widespread popular support and exposed the bounds of individuals’ quiescence’ (p. 10). However, this assertion is considerably undermined by argumentative inconsistencies. For example, she mentions in passing that in over 20 years of Fascist dictatorship, only 12 individuals aside from Luisa Paulovich resisted the regime by filing a suit against its policies of Italianisation (p. 1). By contrast, thousands remained silent in the face of the injustice they witnessed. There is thus serious doubt as to whether these isolated cases of resistance demonstrate ‘limits to popular quiescence’, as promised by the dust jacket. The problem of anecdotal evidence also plagues a second argument made by Hametz – namely, that the judiciary did not bend itself to the dictates of the regime, but rather continued to feel bound to uphold to the rights of individual citizens. Such a far-reaching assertion is by no means supported by the empirical material cited by the author, which is limited to a relatively small selection of source documents from the National Archives and Regional State Archives. An additional glaring problem is that Hametz is hoisted by her own petard, unintentionally disproving her own thesis. For example, she explains that at the beginning of the 1930s, as the suit filed by Luisa Paulovich was in court, ‘fascist reforms were just beginning to filter down to influence the court's decisions’ (p. 66). Yet it gets worse. She shows that the percentage of cases in which the courts upheld complaints filed by Italian citizens fell dramatically in a very short window of time: from 22.5% in 1931 to just 8.7% in 1935 (p. 67). Furthermore, Hametz provides indications that many judges and lawyers had no ethical qualms in implementing Fascist policies. Indeed, Fascism was highly attractive for a younger generation of legal practitioners – not so much for ideological reasons, but because the reforms implemented by the regime offered tremendous opportunities for professional advancement.

In light of such findings, new research has argued precisely against the notion that the Fascist regime failed to win support among the populace. In his study, titled ‘Was there a fascist revolution? The function of penal law in fascist Italy and in Nazi Germany’, Lutz Klinkhammer builds a strong case for the view that Mussolini's regime developed effective control over the Italian police and judiciary, even though its control was perhaps not as extensive as that achieved in the Third Reich.Footnote ⁶ The Danish historian Gert Sørensen goes even further, drawing on the writings of Ernst Fraenkel to argue that like Nazi Germany, Italy should be viewed as a ‘dual state’ that relied on a coexistence between a Normenstaat (‘normative state’) and Massnahmenstaat (‘punitive state’).Footnote ⁷ This means that while the legal frameworks that allowed society and the economy to function persisted after Mussolini's rise to power, the regime also used legal sanctions and naked violence to enforce its dictates. It is rather surprising that Hametz fails to take this research into consideration.

The book by Kate Ferris only resembles Hametz's at first glance. Ferris's book is also a local case study that addresses the relationship between the regime and the populace, in this case examining Venice. Like Hametz, she stresses the importance of traditional ties as the primary force in people's lives. But the similarities between the two studies end there. In contrast to Hametz, Ferris shows that nationalism, Catholicism, militarism and local tradition were co-opted to serve Fascist ideology. In a variety of contexts Fascism was successfully amalgamated with existing frames of reference; in this process, existing symbols and rituals – whether from Catholicism, Classical Rome, Italian unification, or the First World War – were reinterpreted and reinvented to promote new ends. At the same time, Fascism presented itself as a thoroughly modern and forward-looking force. Ferris emphasises that Fascism had something to offer to a wide diversity of groups. The purportedly contradictory character of Fascism was simultaneously a strength.

Ferris's study is both brilliant and nuanced, not least because it draws on concepts that have been developed in the study of other dictatorships, and applies them effectively to Italy. Her book is also compelling on account of its selection of source material, which the author analyses qualitatively as well as quantitatively, thus casting light on questions of magnitude and scope. Ferris draws on official documents as well as diaries, school essays, comic books and obituaries, among other sources. Ultimately, the work addresses a number of extremely interesting and salient topics, ranging from local festivals and youth education to consumption, public donations and funeral rituals.

The degree to which the regime penetrated the practices and institutions of daily life varied from case to case, and is often difficult to reconstruct in retrospect, as the intermixing of narratives regularly led to ambivalent meaning. The population was able to interpret Fascism in a variety of different ways (p. 199). As in other times and places, the Italians under Mussolini were not the unconscious recipients of ideology imposed from above, but played an active role in choosing to accept, reject or adapt the narratives circulated by the ruling elite. Accordingly, it is not surprising that Italian Fascism only achieved ‘partial success’ and to varying degrees (p. 201). According to Ferris, Fascism often did not play an important role in the school system. Instead, she points to nationalism and militarism as the true enablers that granted Fascism traction. This is demonstrated by the manner with which soldiers who died in the African campaigns were buried: The family members of the deceased elected to have a Fascist burial ceremony much more often than the family members of civilians.Footnote ⁸ While Ferris does not address this phenomenon in greater detail, it indicates that wars launched by the regime could function as a sort of social glue. Scholars previously assumed that the war in Abyssinia was of little to no significance to the general populace.

Michael Ebner presents us with a book of similarly high quality. Although Ebner's study is primarily concerned with rejecting the consensus view purported by the revisionist right, he advances a narrative that is by no means reassuring. Ebner does not fall victim to drawing a simple dichotomy between a repressive police force and a suppressed population, as was commonly circulated in the post-war period. Instead, the study, which is notable for its independence of thought, furnishes two insights: the lines between the regime and populace were extremely blurred, and the pursued policies of persecution and discrimination were much broader than typically assumed. In the 1920s a powerful apparatus of persecution was developed with which the regime sought to create a homogenised and racially pure populace. Accordingly, the police did not only direct its repression against opponents of the regime, but also against outcasts such as alcoholics, homosexuals, the mentally ill, beggars and religious minorities such as Jehovah's witnesses and Jews. As noted by Ebner, over 15,000 individuals were imprisoned for political reasons. Yet knowledge of this persecution spread, and was soon ubiquitous: It was increasingly common for someone to know a relative, friend, associate or neighbour who had been subjected to search, arrest and imprisonment. The violence committed by the state was designed to send a clear message to all Italians.

Ebner's study is most compelling when it discusses the extent to which the populace actively collaborated with or was at least willingly subordinate to the Fascist regime. He shows that it is often difficult to draw a clear distinction between the police and citizenry, as successful police work was often dependent on the active support of the populace. Thus, repression inevitably had an interactive character. In this connection, it was not necessary for an individual who denounced another to be an ardent Fascist. The act of denouncing simply had to be in the individual's own interest. One can see how a desire to get even with a disliked neighbour who happened to make critical remarks about the government or party while intoxicated could dovetail with the desire of the regime to enforce its vision of a regimented and obedient society. As Ebner shows, the Italians knew very well how to exploit the system to their own advantage. In this way, even victims of the regime could turn into perpetrators or facilitators of criminal repression. The breakdown of the rule of law allowed cruelty to flourish whatever the motive, and both motives bolstered the regime.

An additional benefit of Ebner's book is that it furnishes interesting opportunities for future studies to compare repression in other states, particularly Nazi Germany. Ebner repeatedly discusses similarities and differences to Himmler's apparatus of terror. The book also points to many instances of transnational cooperation between Germany and Italy, a common finding in the recent literature. From 1936 onward Germany and Italy exchanged a great deal of information on political opponents, and also cooperated in the persecution of social outcasts.Footnote ⁹ In short, even in the area of repression there are a great many opportunities for further clarifying Italy's role in the violent epoch of the early twentieth century.

In his history of Mussolini's Italy, Christopher Duggan goes a step further than Ferris or Ebner. A historian at the University of Reading, Duggan makes a radical break with received historical wisdom. In many ways, Duggan's book is the direct antithesis of Corner’s. While Duggan essentially poses the same question as Corner, he approaches it from a different direction. As Duggan expressly states, his work is a history of Fascism from the perspective of Italian society, and not from the perspective of the Fascist party. For Duggan, Corner's work suffers from an excessive focus on organisational aspects. He argues instead for a wider analytical scope that takes into account the ‘broad emotional framework surrounding Fascism’ (p. XX). With this, Duggan means the cult of Il Duce, the idea of a new European order, colonial expansionism, militarism and the regeneration of national character – the last of which enjoyed great popularity even prior to 1922, a popularity that Fascism seized for its own advantage. In this respect, Duggan and Ferris make a similar argument. Without saying it, it is clear that Duggan believes the Fascist party did not serve as the decisive bond between the regime and the populace (as Corner believes); instead, the deadly utopias propagated by the dictatorship reached people through other channels. Yet these communicative channels are not Duggan's primary concern – and that is perhaps one of the few weaknesses of his book. Rather, Duggan is interested in exploring how Italians ‘experienced and understood the regime in terms of their emotions, ideas, values, practices and expectations’ (p. XII). In this way, Duggan has written a work that is inspired by the perspectives of cultural history, and that is distinctly different from Corner's history of ‘real existing fascism’.

Duggan draws on a rich selection of sources. In addition to official documents such as police reports, he assesses popular songs, films and radio programmes as well as letters, diaries and journals available in dedicated archives in Tuscany and Trentino. Some of the primary sources that Duggan has uncovered are quite impressive, and he uses them to good effect, weaving them into an insightful history of Italian fascism. This is particularly true of the diary entries and letters of soldiers engaged in the wars of conquest in Africa. It is highly unsettling to see the unconcerned manner with which the soldiers in question described war crimes they were involved in.Footnote ¹⁰ The massive use of poison gas was by no means opposed by all soldiers; many even expressly supported its use (pp. 262–8). Duggan shows that a great many Italians were highly receptive to the regime's vision of using violence to secure Italy ‘a place in the sun’.

On the whole, Duggan finds – and this is perhaps the truly explosive finding of the book – that ‘the regime's obsession with forging “new” Italians was internalised to the point of generating a desire to transcend old bourgeois and liberal habits and become attuned to the revolutionary mind-set of fascism’ (p. XX). Drawing on a completely different set of sources from that used by Corner, Duggan reaches the conclusion that Italian Fascism did not in fact fail on all fronts. While clearly very unpopular in many quarters, Fascism was actively supported by specific groups within the society who were inspired by the regime's radical utopias and wholeheartedly assisted in the effort to achieve them. While a massive erosion in the regime's power – particularly in terms of public support for the party – did eventually take place, according to Duggan the cult of personality surrounding Mussolini was strong enough prevent a political unravelling.Footnote ¹¹ In addition, for many Italians who had experienced the implosion of the liberal order in the beginning of the 1920s, there did not seem to be any real political alternative to Fascist rule. And there were also Nazi Germany's achievements and influence as a role model, which alarmed many Italians, but which served to radicalise many others. Yet this does not mean that Nazi Germany forcibly coerced Fascist Italy to bend to its will – a view commonly circulated in Italian accounts that seek to exculpate Italians from blame, particularly in relation to the Anti-Semitic Laws of 1938.Footnote ¹² Quite on the contrary. For Duggan, many Italians were inspired by National Socialism, as they were fascinated by its racist concepts and shared its world-view. In this connection, Duggan musters a range of primary sources that demonstrate the extent to which the German and Italian dictatorships learned from and were inspired by each other – a dimension of international exchange that has been almost wholly neglected in historical research to date. These provocative arguments make Duggan's book one of the most important and controversial portrayals of Italian fascism published in recent memory.

3. Overly deterministic, excessively nation-centred and lacking independence of thought: Critical remarks concerning the new historical understanding of Italian Fascism

While newer studies have made a substantial contribution to expanding historical understanding, some also exhibit certain limits and shortcomings, three of which I would like to address here. First, the prevalence of deterministic arguments is conspicuous, even among younger scholars who did not grow up with Marxism, modernisation theories, and the notion of historical necessity. In general, historical discussions of Italian Fascism – and this is also true of research on the Weimar Republic, the Fourth French Republic and East Germany – are excessively preoccupied with its failure. Historians risk being overly attuned to evidence that foreshadows later failure, overlooking source material that would muddy a cohesive thesis to explain why history took the course that it did. That Corner concludes his study with a chapter titled ‘The Failure of the Party’ is indicative of this fact.

I believe that research should be conducted in a much more open manner, without preconceived notions concerning the results that will be obtained. In the case of Fascist Italy, perhaps one should reverse the question and ask how the regime was able to hold onto power as long as it did, and whether Italian society under Fascism was held together by something more than repression, fear and intimidation. Indeed, this reversal of the question has yielded valuable new insights in research on Weimar, the government of East Germany and the Fourth French Republic.Footnote ¹³ In the case of German Fascism, by contrast, we find an disproportionate concern not with failure, but with the unprecedented violence unleashed by the regime – and, by extension, with its success in mobilising the populace.Footnote ¹⁴ New studies indicate that the Nazi regime had most success in currying the allegiance of the people through organisations that had an ostensibly non-political agenda. In this regard an important role was played by the Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, which formed the core of the Nazi welfare state and was equivalent to the Italian Ente Opere Assistenziali. This organisation was extremely popular among young German women, for it allowed them to perform ‘useful and practical work’. However, working for the organisation also meant lending support to the regime's racist policies, as recently shown by Marie Luise Recker.Footnote ¹⁵ The Volkswohlfahrt was a tool used by the dictatorship to promote racial purity, as only the racially desirable could receive benefits. In my view, greater attention should be devoted to researching the extent to which such quotidian manifestations of Fascist ideology permeated the day-to-day life and consciousness of Italians.

Second, as previously indicated in the introduction, recent studies have focused far too much on refuting De Felice. This is all the more surprising in light of the fact that De Felice was anything but a preeminent scholar. Empirical backing is weak for many of his assertions – many of his citations refer to documents that cannot be tracked in the archives any more. But even more concerning – and to some extent contradictory, considering the prevalence of citational problems – is the excessive faith that De Felice places in official documents: if it is not contained in official sources, for De Felice, it simply does not exist. At the same time, he takes government sources (and, ultimately, the perpetrators of Fascism's crimes) at face value. De Felice simply fails to bring a healthy dose of scepticism to his primary sources. This tendency goes so far that de Felice even adopts the camouflaging language of the regime when discussing its crimes.Footnote ¹⁶ Scholars can and must break free of the influence exerted by De Felice. This exhortation applies in particular to the terminology that De Felice employs. If the terms ‘consensus’ and ‘consent’ are so irredeemably contaminated by politics, as many authors complain, then why continue to use them? One does not have to go as far as the scholars researching National Socialism and adopt the term ‘participation’, which has strong positive connotations.Footnote ¹⁷ But why not use stronger terms, such as inclusion/exclusion, integration and (self-) mobilisation? In this connection an exciting discussion is underway in German research on National Socialism,Footnote ¹⁸ but it has largely gone unnoticed in the historiography of Italian Fascism.

Third, recent research is overly concerned with the Italian experience; similarities and differences to other countries are only mentioned in passing, if at all. While Corner does draw a comparison between the Nazi party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) and the Italian Fascist party, this excursus is much too short at four pages, and only relies on two sources (pp. 124–7). Yet the real problem is that almost everything about his comparison is incorrect; both parties were quite similar in the areas he chooses to contrast. To highlight two mistakes: First, Corner contends incorrectly that the NSDAP had a nationwide platform at its inception. In actual fact, the NSDAP, like the PNF, was shaped over many years by strong local and regional rivalries; the discordance between the Berlin and Munich wings of the party was notorious. Second, Corner asserts that in the power struggle between the party and institutions of state the former clearly prevailed in Germany, while the latter prevailed in Italy. This is simply not true. To make this claim, Corner relies solely on NSDAP propaganda that asserted the ‘party controls the state’. In both Italy and Germany, the desire of the fascist party to control the state met with repeated resistance. In short, both the PNF and NSDAP were less monolithic than they would have one believe.Footnote ¹⁹

Corner not only shows a rather superficial knowledge of the existing literature on Nazi Germany. He also contributes unwittingly to the tendency for scholars of Italian Fascism to marginalise themselves within the discipline of history. This is all the sadder in light of the fact that Corner has been trying for years to bolster the international standing of scholarship on Italian fascism. At a session of the AHA held a few years ago on the topic of popular mobilisation in the dictatorships of the early twentieth century, I personally witnessed how affected Paul Corner was when Claudia Koonz remarked that Fascist Italy was ultimately harmless.Footnote ²⁰ Yet such an opinion should perhaps come as little surprise when one maintains like Corner that Italy was fundamentally different from Nazi Germany.

In order to underscore the importance of Italian Fascism for international history, I believe it is important to elucidate commonalities and points of intersection between Fascist Italy and other regimes, either from a comparative or transnational perspective. At a minimum this would necessitate moving beyond the cliché that Fascist Italy was an unimportant sidekick to the all-powerful Nazi state. For such a perspective overlooks the extent to which Mussolini's Italy exerted an inspirational force over Europe and the rest of the world. Numerous studies have shown that contemporary observers in countries such as the US, UK and Finland were not just impressed by the supposed punctuality with which Italian trains ran. Foreigners were also deeply impressed by the success that Mussolini's regime had in mobilising public support for the Fascist cause. On more than one occasion Hitler underscored that the Third Reich and Mussolini's Italy – which he long held in extremely high esteem – were the only regimes capable of inculcating in their populations the steadfast determination necessary to prevail in a potentially protracted war with the Soviet Union. In this way, we find that an ability to mobilise the populace on a large scale was a key aspect of Fascist self-identity. That Hitler's assessment of Mussolini's state was not solely based on misperception is shown in new work published by Ferris and Duggan, both of whom draw on new source material. Fascism was undoubtedly rejected by broad segments of Italian society, and the promises of the regime left many unimpressed. Yet Fascism did experience a great deal of success in rallying popular support – particularly when it leveraged traditional epicentres of meaning within society, using them as vehicles to serve its own ends. Duggan, in particular, impressively illuminates this phenomenon. At the same time, he shows a way to transcend the isolation currently suffered by the subfield of Italian Fascism, but which is partly of its own creation.