In his trenchant and stimulating review article Patrick Bernhard surveyed a series of English-language studies that focus in one way or another on the relationship between the fascist regime and the Italian people.Footnote ¹ Drawing on the historiography of Nazi Germany, Bernhard took these studies as his cue to argue that much of the historiography on Italian Fascism is outdated. In particular, he sees the approach adopted to assessing the regime's appeal as often old-fashioned, with the result that Italian historians have vastly underestimated ordinary Italians’ embrace of fascism and their complicity in its violence and war crimes. At the same time, he argues that histories of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy show far more parallels and intersections than have been acknowledged of late and calls on Italian historians to turn their attention to this entangled history.

Because Bernhard's critique seems paradoxically both insightful and wide of the mark, it prompted me to offer some reflections on points of contact and difference between the histories and historiographies of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. In particular, Bernhard's review implicitly raises some intriguing questions about the different moral and political contexts that have shaped the national historiographies of the two regimes. With that in mind, I also want to ask how far, as Bernhard suggests, we can assume that the findings of historians of Nazi Germany are directly applicable to the Italian context.

It is commonplace that for any period and any topic of history, the terms of historical debate are often ultimately driven by broadly moral or political concerns. This has certainly been true and continues to be true for the historiographies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. But what strikes us, looking at Bernhard's approach and that of the historian he most strongly takes to task, Paul Corner, is that while both, in fact, share a similar kind of moral impulse, it takes them in opposite directions. Both are driven by a desire not to let those responsible for Fascism off the hook, and both are reacting against what they see as historians’ tendency to belittle the true potency of Mussolini's movement. For Corner, and indeed a number of prominent historians of Italian Fascism, this has meant emphasising the violent, repressive and corrupt character of Mussolini's rule over its ability to mobilise support. Corner's implicit critique is directed at those historians who have foregrounded the regime's success in selling its program to the population, and thus, in his view, underplayed the iron fist in the velvet glove. Bernhard by contrast is arguing for the reverse: he criticises Corner for underplaying society's participation and mobilisation in a totalitarian project of racial regeneration and territorial expansion and thus overstating Fascism's weakness and failure. Bernhard here interestingly does not lean on Corner's ‘opponents’ within the Italian historiography (more on that in a moment) and draws instead on a strong current in recent scholarship of Nazi Germany which highlights popular mobilisation. In a nutshell, for Corner emphasising consensus lets the regime off the hook, while for Bernhard emphasising duress lets the population off the hook.

As briefly intimated, these differences in approach result not from the personal predilections of two authors but are the expression of two historiographies. While a critical scholarship of fascist Italy emphasises the regime's repression of a refractory population, similarly critical spirits writing the history of Nazi Germany focus on the power and success of the ‘people's community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) and even the Nazis’ ability to create ‘belonging’ around ‘genocide’.Footnote ² There are some obvious differences in the trajectories of the two regimes, which explain at least some of the background here. Mussolini came to power with little popular support and a good deal of violence and was eventually toppled from within; Hitler had significant electoral backing and his armies continued to fight with unabated ferocity until an unprecedented four-fifths of German territory was in enemy hands. Mussolini ruled over an impoverished and underdeveloped country for over twenty years, during which little improved in the lives of most Italians and a series of foreign conflicts eventually embroiled the domestic population in war; Hitler ruled for only six years in peacetime, overseeing a remarkable economic recovery, and for a further six years in a war in which Germans’ standard of living remained relatively unaffected. Mussolini's mass murders were in far-off colonial contexts (and most European powers in the decades before and after fascist Italy had vicious campaigns of colonial repression of their own to conceal and forget); Hitler pursued an unparalleled continental-wide genocide and utterly ruthless anti-civilian, anti-partisan reprisal policies on European soil. These and other differences may not undermine the claim of underlying affinities between the regimes, but they do at least give some obvious reasons for expecting that the national historiographies might come to different conclusions about the relationship between regime and people.

The disparities in the approaches outlined above remind us too, however, of a certain ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ (‘Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen’) in the two historiographies; or rather they remind us that the big wheel of historical interpretation slowly traverses similar terrains in both but not at the same time. From the vantage point of Germany's historiography, Italian historians who emphasise duress and portray a population seeking to challenge its status of oppression seem to be stuck in the 1970s – the heyday of German work on opposition and resistance. But thinking about Bernhard's call to transfer German cultural history approaches to the Italian case, the Italian historiography seems a good half-turn ahead. After all, Paul Corner's resurrection of the social history of dissent is precisely a reaction against two decades of cultural-historical emphasis on the production and diffusion of fascist ideology and the historiography of political religion and totalitarian ambition. Italian scholars started to explore Fascism's cultural suffusion earlier and to a much greater extent than their German colleagues; Germans in turn have more been more willing than the Italians to paint their forebears as ‘bad people’ (cattiva gente).Footnote ³ However, in relation to the German context, Corner may even here be anticipating the next trend, as there is a sense in various quarters that the scholarship on Nazism has been too ready to see a pact between the regime and the German population.Footnote ⁴

Only in the Italian case does historical debate concern not just the degree of popular support, energy and acclamation mobilised by the regime but also whether popular support or consensus sheds, as it were, good light on the regime or bad light on the people. In the German case, by contrast, the moral standing of the Nazi regime is unequivocal. Whenever there have been attempts by historians – be it Ernst Nolte or Rainer Zitelmann – to endeavour some kind of partial rehabilitation in the public sphere, the attempt has quickly been squashed. Since the 1960s, then, the debate in Germany has centred on who should be implicated. In the early 1960s a bitter controversy erupted over whether earlier German statesmen had anticipated Hitler's foreign policy. The animus then shifted to the intentionalist-functionalist debate, when the question was whether Hitler bore central responsibility for Nazi policy or whether a wide swathe of functionaries drove the regime over the cliff. In the 1980s a new generation of critical young scholars incriminated scientists, geographers, doctors and other professionals in racial research and ‘research on the East’ (Ostforschung) which informed and gave impetus to Nazi plans in the East. A decade later, research by Ulrich Herbert and Michael Wildt inculpated the brightest and best of the 1920s student generation, while recent work has foregrounded the popular buy-in to Nazi racism and even genocide.Footnote ⁵ But whichever group is in the limelight, there is no doubt about the moral implications of being figured as a supporter or proponent of the regime.

In the Italian case, the situation is different. The point is not just that a broad section of public opinion is willing to remember the regime in a benign light. Even specialists of fascist Italy, as Alexander De Grand wrote recently, ‘do not agree on how bad it was’.Footnote ⁶ In some ways this state of affairs might be traced back to the memory politics of the early years of the Republic. For while the Republic's founding narrative was antifascist and the Republic seen as the successor to the popular uprising against Mussolini, fascist crimes in fact went largely unpunished, former fascist elites continued in positions of power and influence and the fascist legacy lived on in a fringe party. These circumstances created the space for a creeping normalisation of the fascist regime, but it was a turn in the scholarship that did most to facilitate a broader retrospective redemption of the regime and its leader. While the reality of societal backing for Mussolini's dictatorship had already been acknowledged by communist leader Palmiro Togliatti,Footnote ⁷ the work of Renzo De Felice took a further step. De Felice not only emphasised the degree of societal involvement, which he termed consenso (alternatively translated as consent or consensus),Footnote ⁸ but also painted a picture of a relatively benign and pragmatic Mussolini, whose regime bore no affinity with that of its German ally. Since De Felice, work on Fascism's appeal has not necessarily sought to redeem the regime. And yet De Felice's influential juxtaposition of popularity and pragmatism, vulgarised by the media and reinforced by revisionist pundits, changed the moral universe in which scholars write about Fascism. Contrary to De Felice's own aspiration to scientific objectivity, in the ensuing debate about popular support under Fascism the stakes have never been merely empirical or analytical, and always moral and political.

The reality of popular support ranging from acclamation and mobilisation to acquiescence and participation certainly needed to be recognised; and many historians of fascist Italy were eager to explore that possibility at a time when the scholarship on Nazism was not yet ready to do so. They went about examining fascist ideology and spectacle, often conceiving premises, goals and manifestations as a ‘political religion’ with totalitarian ambitions.Footnote ⁹ They explored the newly created spaces and opportunities for previously marginalised groups as well as the regime's efforts to involve intellectuals, artists, scientists and journalists to bring its message to the masses.Footnote ¹⁰ They also showed how the regime managed to rouse Italians from all walks of life for several of its projects, such as the creation of a national community or Italy's claim to world power status. But somehow with De Felice and his popular resonance in the background, the broad ambit of this research always ran the risk of making the regime look harmless.

The myths and twists of Italian historiography and public opinion – a dominant antifascist narrative condemning the regime but absolving the ‘good Italian people’ (italiani, brava gente), and the myth of the brava gente in turn rescuing the regime via a logic whereby ‘good people’ could not have supported a bad regime – depended in many ways on something the Germans could not take advantage of: that there was someone worse. On a variety of levels, the potential to render Mussolini harmless, incompetent, buffoonish or pragmatic depended on the example of Hitler. What had been true for the antifascists and international observers of a stamp of Hannah Arendt remained true for De Felice and his followers: Italy looked like the ‘lesser evil’.Footnote ¹¹ It was the implicit sense that here was a regime that had not gone off the rails like the German one that made it politically and psychologically easier to distinguish between a moderate (Italian) and a radical (German) Fascism and to talk about consensus in the case of the former. In a way not true of the German historiography, Italian scholarship thus drew on the comparison for the purpose of whitewashing Italy's share of crimes. By now, though, there are a number of voices – Bernhard is one, but there are historians in Italy itself – who seek to puncture the myth of the ‘lesser evil’. They not only highlight fascist crimes but also align Italy with Germany, foregrounding similar styles of rule, similar expansionary projects, similar racial thinking and similarly murderous occupation policies.Footnote ¹²

Because the Germans had no plausible comparison under which to shelter (give or take Nolte's abortive attempt to make the Soviet Gulags the ‘original’ crime), over the last two decades German scholars have, as noted, led the way in exploring societal participation in violence and genocide. Does that mean that the Italian historiography should now follow suit? Or does the German historiography have something to learn from recent work on Italian Fascism about the relationship between regime and people? A case can certainly be made for the German example that a moral animus over the last two decades has led historians to produce judgments of popular involvement that may be at once too sweeping, involving the entire population in a murderous program of racial regeneration and too narrow, focusing on the racial issue to the exclusion of all others.Footnote ¹³ As Nicholas Stargardt argues, the approach to popular attitudes has perhaps been overly ‘functionalist’, whereby the regime's destructive power is taken as evidence of the population's ideological commitment. Stargardt's forthcoming book shows, however, that this interpretation does not hold for the war years, when popular willingness to carry on fighting actually went hand in hand with great disillusionment with the regime.Footnote ¹⁴ What this suggests is that we need a sharper analysis of the complex and paradoxical interrelationships between opposition, assent, coercion and consent.

Recent historiography in the Italian case already points in this direction. Current scholarship, including my own recent collection coedited with Giulia Albanese, takes as its starting point a paradoxical force field in which assent and coercion were inextricably interwoven.Footnote ¹⁵ The groups of Italians that supported the regime varied markedly over time and were motivated by very different reasons. Often, attitudes and expectations that did not comply with those of the regime nonetheless made it possible for the regime to stay in power. For many Italians, fascist violence was welcome and thus ‘consensual’, and indeed fascist violence depended for its impact on popular support. For all Italians, whether opponents or supporters, the regime increasingly encroached on their daily lives. ‘Consent’ in whatever form, was thus always an artefact of the regime's intrusive and violent character. The fascist societal relations that have been misleadingly identified as ‘consensual’ should thus be understood as anything but clear and obvious. The boundaries and relationships between support, acceptance, acquiescence and defiance were complex and fluctuating. A sign of how much the opposing historiographical camps are moving towards each other is that in his recent study Corner presents his work as ‘complementary’ to the one on acclamation, while in a recent critical review of Christopher Duggan's book, Emilio Gentile, the key interpreter of Fascism as political religion, highlights the importance of coercion in sustaining the regime.Footnote ¹⁶

Some of this recent Italian work may be of interest for the German case. The two historiographies no doubt have much to learn from each other, and the work on collaboration, borrowings and crossovers between the two regimes holds much promise.Footnote ¹⁷ But we should not forget that Italian Fascism and Nazi Germany arrived and departed in very different ways. Neither one was the mirror of the other, and neither one can provide the other's moral standard. If it was misleading to exculpate fascist Italy by arguing it was ‘not Germany’, we are unlikely to arrive at an appropriate assessment by insisting that it must be ‘just as bad as Germany’. Perhaps it was, but it was its own regime, with its own origins, its own political culture, its own ambitions and constraints and its own path to destruction.