In reply to Patrick Bernhard's critical review of my recent book I will make some brief general observations about the study of totalitarian and would-be totalitarian regimes.Footnote ¹

Some preliminary remarks are necessary. Bernhard locates his review within the context of the debate over Italians' consensus for Fascism – a debate continuing in Italy, with highs and lows, since the mid-1970s. His own approach is clearly very much influenced by the methodologies of cultural history; he looks for emotions, sentiments, practices and experiences in order to form a picture of how Italians lived under the regime. He approves of the history that finds these. There is much to commend this approach, and I would certainly not argue against its value – cultural studies do, indeed, have a great deal to offer. But the methodology of cultural studies is not, and cannot be, the only approach, nor its absence the only criterion for criticism.

Bernhard, in his thirst for cultural history, assimilates my book to this area of study and finds it wanting. This stems from a misreading of what the book is about. My book is first and foremost an examination of the provincial Fascist Party federations in the 1930s; it is not primarily about everyday life, it is not about why people became fascist or what they saw in fascism. It is a study of the workings of the provincial party organisations – who ran them, what competences these federations had, what difficulties they faced, how they were financed and, above all, what dynamics determined their operations. It then proceeds to look at how people reacted to the local party administration, but even here it is the local party federation that remains at the centre of the picture.

This approach, according to Bernhard, is ‘conventional’, uses a ‘socio-historical perspective’ and is an ‘intentional rejection of cultural history as a method of investigation’. By implication it is old and flawed – a child of the 1970s, when we knew no better. In response, a couple of points regarding methodologies are in order – methodologies that relate in general to the study of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

The first is that the central feature of all such regimes, once they are established in power, is that of organisation, regimentation and mobilisation. As Michael Mann writes, ‘Fascism was not just a collection of individuals with certain beliefs. Fascism had a great impact on the world only because of its collective actions and its organisational forms.’Footnote ² These forms involve the exercise of power, both at central and local level; they involve the state and the single party structure. They involve strict social control for the realisation of projects of social engineering. It seems to me impossible to say anything useful about how people experienced a regime of this kind without first establishing the parameters within which they lived. This is as true for the Soviet Union under Stalin as it is for Nazi Germany or for the Soviet Satellite countries of Eastern Europe after 1945 – in short for all authoritarian and repressive dictatorships of the recent past. It is, in all probability, true for present-day North Korea.

In Italy, as I try to show, these parameters were – increasingly in the course of the 1930s – established in large part by the provincial party organisation and by all the other local fascist agencies over which the local party had either control or influence. Again, this is true for all such regimes – the provincial organisations are fundamental to the affirmation of the regime. The starting point for any understanding of how the Italian regime worked on a mundane day-to-day basis in the provinces – and it is this that I mean when I refer to ‘real existing Fascism’ – is, therefore the study of the structures and workings of power. These established, it is then possible to assess levels of penetration, degrees of collaboration and voluntary compliance, evidence of protest or consent and to examine the inevitable areas of ambiguity and ambivalence in popular opinion; it is then also possible to assess the force of the undoubted ‘cultural’ factors operating to bolster the regime.

Without these parameters, there is simply no way to measure what is always, even when positive, essentially a reaction to an affirmation of power. As, in different ways, both James Scott and Alf Lüdtke have shown so well, one of the central concepts in the study of ‘everyday life’ is that of people's ‘navigation’ within the context of domination – but to appreciate the ‘navigation’ one has to first understand the nature of domination. To separate opinion within totalitarian regimes from its context is to risk failing to understand how such regimes function – and at times cultural history risks doing just that.

This leads to the second point – the sources. Bernhard criticises my use of ‘official documents’ (by this he means the reports of prefects, local fascist leaders and police and fascist party informers conserved in the archives) on the grounds that they are unreliable. He takes me to task for not using ‘diaries, letters and memoirs of “ordinary Italians”’. Fairly self-evidently, it depends on what you are looking for. The sources he would favour are not going to tell me how the fascist federation of Pisa was financed in 1935 or why people had stopped going to fascist meetings in Verona in 1937. Unless I am very lucky, a personal diary is not going to tell me how many artisans were enrolled in the Parma federation in 1939. Again, he misreads the subject of the book. The sources I use are imposed by the subject chosen – and the subject is the political party in the Italian provinces. ‘Official documentation’ is clearly relevant here. The critical report of a prefect on the workings of the local fascio and the reply of the local fascist leader to those criticisms can be extremely illuminating; the reports of fascist inspectors on the problems relating to corruption within a particular fascio can be of enormous value. Which is to say that the study of an organisation requires the study of the documentation related to that organisation, which means looking at ‘official’ documents. Where these concern popular opinion in relation to the party (here we are talking about police and party informers, but not exclusively – Bernhard may not have seen these sources; there are many private letters included in both police and party files) the reports have, of course, to be used with caution and even with a good dose of scepticism (as I say in the book).

There is, of course, an important methodological point here. Informers are suspect as sources – and this is true, to a greater or a lesser extent, for the study of all repressive regimes. As everyone knows, the veracity of informers represents a permanent question facing historians of those states which close down the normal channels of public discussion. For many years now, historians of the Soviet Union have argued about how the svodki should be used and what kind of interpretation should be given to them. Doubts certainly exist about reading them just as they are written. But are we totally sure that personal diaries and letters do not present analogous problems, that they can always be taken at face value? Are they invariably the expression of the innermost private sentiments rather than a reflection of the public façade? Bernhard seems to have no doubts on this score nor on the question of the representative nature of sentiments reproduced in diaries.

Yet letters written to the authorities are, to some degree, public statements and are conditioned by that fact – as they were, for example, in the Soviet Union, where people learned to speak and write ‘Bolshevik’ when addressing the authorities, or in the GDR, where the Eingaben petitions showed a remarkable mastery of the official language. Under a repressive regime, the mode of expression is often a reflection of the expectations of the regime itself. As the study of Soviet diaries has suggested, people wrote not only what they believed but also what they felt they ought to believe. Just like other archival documents, therefore, and as any experienced historian is well aware, even diaries and letters may well be formulaic narratives and need, for that reason, to be interpreted with caution. Moreover, and in any case, a process of self-censorship is bound to operate – keeping a personal diary that is strongly critical of a repressive regime is never the wisest of practices. All of this indicates that each of these differing sources needs to be treated with circumspection and judged in context; it is the experience of the historian in dealing with the particular source that comes into play here.

In the case of the Italian fascist informers, what suggests a certain level of credibility is the fact that reports from so many different parts of Italy seem often to be saying the same things and that, in the context of the late 1930s, they reproduce the same popular complaints about the regime and corroborate the same expressions of worry and concern voiced by prefects and local party secretaries across the country. And they do this not only for the working class but also for the shopkeepers, office workers, public sector employees and even professional people – those groups generally assumed to be the backbone of the regime. The informers do not target exclusively the areas of likely opposition, therefore. It is because of this mass of evidence in which different voices complement each other (and not because of any ‘overly deterministic’ reasoning) that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, at the end of the 1930s, the fascist movement was facing serious problems. In fact, rather paradoxically, Bernhard concedes my conclusions on several occasions in his review, when he talks about ‘a massive erosion in the regime's power – particularly in terms of public support for the party’, when he states that the regime was ‘clearly very unpopular in certain quarters’ and when he recognises that ‘Fascism was undoubtedly rejected by broad segments of Italian society’. Yet, he also discounts the means by which we know them and, at the same time, persists in believing that the regime had ‘a great deal of success in rallying popular support’. One is tempted to ask, so which is it?

The belief in ‘direct’, first person sources may be justified in many cases – they are a powerful source because they seem to say what people felt – but, before we burn the official archives, we might consider that many ministerial archival documents also have something to say about sentiments and emotions. I certainly do not imagine, as Bernhard suggests, that the only true fascists were those in uniform (nor that all those in uniform were true fascists), but when I read reports from many different regions that, in 1939, fascists were reluctant to be seen in uniform because of the public stigma attached to those uniforms, I can – I believe quite legitimately – infer something about their emotions and those of the people around them.

The review also raises the issue of the ‘marginalisation’ of Italian studies, and of the study of Italian Fascism in particular – a marginalisation in respect to Nazism and Soviet communism. The problem certainly exists. For example, in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick's excellent edited book of essays, Beyond Totalitarianism, Italian Fascism merits one mention in 536 pages, Mussolini the same – and this for the country which invented the term ‘totalitarianism’. Perhaps not here, but in many other instances, the curious absence of Italian Fascism seems to depend on body count. Because the Italian fascists killed fewer people than their German and Soviet counterparts, they are somehow considered less ‘serious’ – a ‘lesser evil’ that very quickly becomes transposed to no evil at all. When Italians accept this interpretation in a spirit of self-absolution – the Mussolini memorabilia on every newsstand testify to the fact – it is understandable; when historians do the same, it is less so, and in the past I have made this point repeatedly. Yet Bernhard accuses me of ‘unwittingly’ contributing to the marginalisation of Italian fascist studies, first by protesting at the view that Italian Fascism was innocuous, and then by suggesting that, in some ways, Nazism and Fascism were not alike. The logic escapes me. Comparisons between regimes are intended to discover similarities and differences; the discovery of differences should in no way provoke any kind of marginalisation, unless, of course, one holds the view that Nazism is the central feature of the epoch and that any divergence from the Nazi path is, by definition, marginal. As a historian of Italian Fascism, I do sometimes get the impression that this is the position of some colleagues; it seems to me to be a position that is detrimental to our understanding of both Nazism and Fascism.

Obviously, on the specific question of the comparison of the Partito Nazionale Fascista with the role of the Nazi Party, I must bow to Bernhard's superior knowledge of Nazism. There are two points I was trying to make. First that local politics and local issues played a much more decisive role in weakening Italian Fascism than they did in Nazi Germany. This is not to say that local politics were not important in Germany or that the local Nazi parties did not suffer from many of the same problems as their Italian counterparts – as Jill Stephenson has shown so well for Württemberg, the NSDAP was plagued by little local conflictsFootnote ³ – nor is it to underestimate the extent of rivalries between different groups within the Nazi party, which are well known and a different matter. It is simply to say that, for many Italian fascists – particularly the local fascist leaders – local priorities remained more important than the national imperatives right to the end and that this damaged the regime immensely – more so than in Germany. And, second, if the Nazi Party did not dominate the state (and I do talk of the reality of ‘a very confused polycracy’), I think few students of Nazism would assert that the Nazi provincial party organisation was subject to the state authorities in quite the way that the local PNF leaders were subject to the prefect in fascist Italy. There was simply no figure in provincial fascist party equivalent in his range of powers to those of the Nazi Gauleiter, particularly when he (the Gauleiter) combined this role with that of Reichsstatthalter, as was the case in Württemberg.

In his concluding section Bernhard stuns us all with the news that historical research should be carried out with an open mind and decries the lack of independence of thought of historians of contemporary Italy, apparently working with ‘preconceived notions’ about Fascism. In Bernhard's view, historians of Italy are still conditioned to too great an extent by the work of Renzo De Felice, the principal proponent of the ‘consensus’ theory. With respect to the perpetuation of the ‘consensus’ debate, he has a point (although it might have been expressed a little more elegantly). What has happened is that, for particular reasons related to Italy's recent past, the debate over the existence of a consensus for Fascism has, in reality, often been more about the present than the past and has had strong current political overtones. These overtones have tended to prevent any dispassionate treatment of the historical question and discouraged empirical research. However, there is now ample evidence that this moment is passing and that a more detached perspective is being generated, in particular among a new generation of younger historians.Footnote ⁴ The issue of popular participation during Fascism does inevitably remain an important question for historians of Italy, and, after all, Bernhard does begin his review by stating that ‘the question of popular support for European dictatorships is one of the most contested and difficult questions in international contemporary history’.

But, even granted the general point of ‘time to move on’, Bernhard's attack on De Felice – ‘anything but a pre-eminent scholar’ – is overstated. De Felice may have his weaknesses, as anyone who has tackled his monumental work will recognise, but it is difficult to study Fascism without reference to his volumes, and it is hardly De Felice's fault if ‘many of his citations refer to documents that cannot be tracked in the archives any more’ – the archives were re-ordered some time after De Felice published his work. The implied accusation of tampering with the evidence is clear and totally unjustified. Indeed, for Bernhard, able at one point in his review to make the remarkable assertion that, prior to 2012, ‘Scholars . . . assumed that the war in Abyssinia was of little to no significance to the general populace’, a re-reading of De Felice (and of many others) might be well advised.