As a non-specialist in the historiography of Fascism and Nazism, I enter this discussion with trepidation. Viewed from the outside, antagonism and rigidity have long characterised historical debate about the causes, nature and consequences of both regimes, although it is clear (and as the other contributions published here have pointed out) that some of this fierceness has attenuated of late with the rise of a new generation of historians. I don't propose to go over the various points of disagreement about fascist Italy – the problem of popular ‘consensus’ for the regime, the reasons for collective ‘amnesia’ after the fall of the regime, and the myth of ‘Italians as good people’ (Italiani brava gente) – as these have already been discussed by Bernhard in his review and in the contributions by Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher. Nor will I enter into related debates about the Italian Resistance, the issue of Italian war crimes and the broader controversy about ‘divided memory’ in post-war Italy, although these questions have also generated a significant literature in recent years.Footnote ¹ Instead I want simply to re-visit Paul Corner's The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy and to propose a rather different interpretation than the one offered by Patrick Bernhard.

First, it strikes me that it would be a pity if Bernhard's thought provoking review was to revive previous antagonisms – or indeed create new ones. I say this because the thrust of new scholarship is to replace older debates about popular responses to fascist regimes with an interpretation that sees consent and coercion as intimately entwined, and this shift offers more room for compromise and possibly agreement.Footnote ² Furthermore, in this respect and in others (and as I hope to explain), I believe Bernhard's criticisms of Corner to be largely misplaced, based as they are on a misreading of Corner's aims and methodology.

To start with, Bernhard compares Corner's volume unfavourably to Christopher Duggan's Fascist Voices.Footnote ³ He suggests that Duggan's sources are both more informative and more interesting than Corner's official documents and posits that Duggan's broad conclusion – that there was active and even wholehearted support for the fascist regime among certain groups in Italian society – is more convincing. What's more, as a work said to be inspired by cultural history, Duggan offers the possibility of overcoming ‘the isolation currently suffered by the subfield of Italian fascism’ (an isolation that ‘is partly of its own creation’) and of connecting with studies on Nazi Germany. So Duggan's book, Bernhard asserts is ‘[i]n many ways . . . the direct antithesis of Corner's’.Footnote ⁴

But is this really the case? Rather than being antithetical, it strikes me that the two books are remarkably complementary: to be sure, they tell different stories, but this is because they focus on different aspects of the fascist experience. Duggan is concerned primarily with the cult of Mussolini and its popular reception, Corner with the Fascist Party and how ‘an extraordinarily ambitious project’ translated into the reality of local, ‘day-to-day politics’.Footnote ⁵ Duggan stresses the success of Mussolini's personality cult more than Corner does, but even Corner points out that in so far as the Fascists constructed an effective collective organisation, the history of the regime ‘was by no means simply a history of failure’.Footnote ⁶

In the end, moreover, both historians agree that the regime was not a success: for Duggan, the regime's ‘ideological weakness’ made Mussolini ‘as much by default as by design, the emotional lynchpin of the regime’. Linked to this ‘hollowness’, he goes on, ‘was . . . a deep dissatisfaction . . . with both the state and the party bureaucracy’, a dissatisfaction fuelled by the proliferation of corruption and clientelism in the 1930s.Footnote ⁷ Here Duggan directly echoes Corner's findings that provincial battles, factionalism and the self-serving behaviour of local officials played a crucial role in undermining the popularity of the fascist regime.

It is also questionable whether Duggan's book is really a work of cultural history. Duggan himself says that his book is intended to be ‘a broad history of Italy between 1919 and 1945’ (this is the ‘general framing chronological narrative’).Footnote ⁸ By the same token, I would strongly deny that Corner's approach is, in Bernhard's words, ‘conventional’, ‘unsurprising’ and ‘deterministic’ or that Corner ‘foregoes an immense opportunity to generate new insights’.Footnote ⁹ In my view, Corner tells a more surprising, unusual and open-ended story than Duggan (and I say this not in criticism of Duggan's book but rather to emphasise that Duggan's real innovation lies not so much in a new analysis of Italian Fascism as in his use of different, previously unheard ‘voices’). There is little that is deterministic in Corner's narrative, which instead concentrates on exploring how the Fascist Party changed over time. It is simply wrong to imply, as Bernhard does, that Corner's methodology has not moved on from the 1970s or that it combines social history with ‘a classic top-down approach’.Footnote ¹⁰ To mix these two opposing approaches would anyway be quite a feat. Indeed, given the recent dominance of cultural history and the emphasis on ideology in analyses of Italian Fascism, Corner's focus on social groups and the organisational functioning of the regime should be considered innovative rather than old-fashioned.Footnote ¹¹

Far from being traditional, Corner adopts a novel perspective on the fascist regime. Rather than pay attention to the central hierarchy of the regime, Corner takes the party in the provinces as his starting point. A focus on the local and particular allows Corner to, as he puts it, avoid being captivated by ‘the image of coherence and unity that the regime was to try to create for itself in later years’ and shift our gaze away from the ‘monolithic’ image of Fascism produced by the figure of Mussolini.Footnote ¹² Thus, the book is filled with small yet revealing stories of incompetence, rivalry and thwarted ambitions. In the course of his narrative, and in painstaking and sometimes exquisite detail, Corner gives us a new and remarkably incisive understanding of just how Fascism did not succeed. In his words, ‘Italy proved stronger than Fascism’;Footnote ¹³ it was on the ground, in the daily functioning of the party at a local level, and not in Mussolini's personality cult or foreign adventures, that this lack of success was first felt and can be most clearly observed. By the late 1930s Fascism was in difficulties in many provinces; thus, the crisis of the regime should be dated to before Italy's entrance into the Second World War.

Bernhard also takes Corner to task for his ‘unmitigated trust’ in the ‘reality’ revealed in official government documents and for his unwillingness to consult ego-documents, such as letters and diaries, seemingly considered by Corner to be ‘non-representative’.Footnote ¹⁴ This accusation is unfair. Perhaps the problem lies in the use of the term ‘public opinion’ in the book's title (and the cover image of Mussolini in front of cheering crowds), which might suggest at first glance that this is a book about how ordinary people saw the Duce. However, this is not the primary aim of Corner's inquiry. Instead, his interest lies in uncovering how the party perceived, dealt with and reported on popular responses to the regime. And in this respect, his use of government documents, based on exhaustive research, is both eminently legitimate and necessary; indeed, it would be hard to imagine how he could have written the book without having done so. Furthermore, Corner directly addresses the problem of sources and urges caution when using, as he does, the reports of government informers.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, I can find no evidence for the ‘unmitigated trust’ so criticised by Bernhard (and we should also note as a counterpoint that Duggan relies for his conclusions on relatively few diaries and letters and also refers to several problems in the use of ego-documents).Footnote ¹⁶

Hence, rather than condemn Corner for using government reports and praise Duggan for reading diaries, it might be more helpful to reflect on the contrasts and the similarities revealed by these different sources and consider what they can tell us about the ‘varied nature of Italians’ experience of Fascism’ (as Corner puts it).Footnote ¹⁷ As a final point on sources, personally I find it hard to condemn a historian for a failure to use a certain type of source, one that is considered marginal to his analysis, when otherwise he has written a book based on extensive, in-depth and meticulous research. This research, moreover, has uncovered a great deal of new material that is arguably more relevant to Corner's inquiry.

Like any book of this scale and ambition, Corner's work is not without shortcomings. For instance, Bernhard may well be right about the inaccuracies in Corner's depiction of the Nazi Party; I lack the expertise to judge. I do question, however, whether Corner ever argues quite as categorically as Bernhard suggests that ‘Italy was fundamentally different to Nazi Germany’.Footnote ¹⁸ It also seems excessive to criticise Corner for not engaging in comparative research when his is a book about fascist Italy. But in terms of the book's overall structure, I found that its two sections (on the state and the party and on the party and the people) fit together somewhat awkwardly and that the first section is stronger than the second. It is a shame that the book contains no images and, above all, that it costs so much money. We can only hope that Oxford University Press produces a paperback soon.

None of this should, however, take away from Corner's major achievement. His book makes a fundamental contribution to our understanding of how the fascist regime in Italy worked in practice. Moreover, his interpretation adds to and helps direct current debates about popular support for the regime, and it moves us beyond the controversies generated by De Felice about the degree of consensus enjoyed by the fascist regime between 1929 and 1936.Footnote ¹⁹ Corner explains that he wishes to avoid the use of the term ‘consensus’ because it is simply ‘inadequate to describe the complexities of popular attitudes towards . . . [the] regime’, a regime in which coercion was always a ‘conditioning context’.Footnote ²⁰ It makes little sense, in other words, to talk about consensus when people live under a dictatorship. Instead, Corner adds to a growing body of research that has begun to unravel the different motives that led Italians to support or oppose – and to compromise and collaborate with – the fascist regime and that has shown how all these attitudes could coexist and/or take ambivalent forms.

Writing as someone who has concentrated on the history of the Risorgimento and liberal Italy, and on the politics of history and memory, this book is especially welcome. Corner does not attempt to revive notions of an Italian Sonderweg; indeed he steers clear of this now stale and largely defunct debate.Footnote ²¹ However, his work does suggest some striking similarities between liberal and fascist Italy (thereby adding to his thesis that the regime failed to resolve, as it claimed to do, the weaknesses that had undermined the previous regime). Like its liberal predecessor, he argues, fascist Italy's failure was to be found in the decidedly unspectacular realm of public administration. Put simply, in the provincial cities and towns, neither the liberal nor the fascist regime managed effectively to direct its own personnel, while the local political party became (or remained) the lynchpin for networks of personal power. For all the fascist rhetoric, the problem of corrupt and/or work-shy officials and the system of clientelism that had undermined the regime's legitimacy in the liberal period persisted, and may even have intensified, in the brave new fascist world. Efforts to resolve these difficulties seem merely to have made matters worse. Much like liberal Italy, in other words (and as was later to be the case in the Italian Republic too), ambitiously conceived projects of national improvement and ‘regeneration’ fell short of the mark – eroded from within by the very people who were charged with carrying these projects out. It is here, rather than in any ‘peculiar’ path to the modern world, that the real continuities in modern Italian history may lie.