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To cite this Article Bellassai, Sandro(2005) 'The masculine mystique: antimodernism and virility in fascist Italy', Journal of
Modern Italian Studies, 10: 3, 314 — 335
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13545710500188338
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13545710500188338
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Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10(3) 2005: 314 – 335
Sandro Bellassai
Abstract
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This article examines the connections between the defense of a traditional concept of
masculinity and the anti-modernist discourse which characterized the fascist regime.
This nexus took shape in the campaign against urbanization and its concomitant
exaltation of the peasant world, as well as in the critique of intellectuals and the anti-
bourgeois campaign. Through a critique of the modern woman, fascism emphasized
the hierarchical relationship between the sexes, which found its justification in the
supposed immutability of the subaltern feminine role.
Keywords
Fascism, masculinity, modernization, gender.
reasons, the term ‘virility’ represents a key feature of the fascist vision of the
world. In short, one can agree with Barbara Spackman’s claim ‘that virility is
not simply one of many fascist qualities, but rather that the cults of youth, of
duty, of sacrifice and heroic virtues, of strength and stamina, of obedience and
authority, and of physical strength and sexual potency that characterize fascism
are all inflections of that master term, virility’ (Spackman 1996: xii; see Falasca
Zamponi 1997: 24 – 5).
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Italian masculinities
influences; and the cult of a full and indisputable virility was to be collectively
reaffirmed.4
Initiatives regarding a virile reintegration of the male ‘character’ and body
were particularly dear to political and cultural currents and movements of more
or less fervent nationalistic and antidemocratic inspiration in Giolitti’s pre-war
Italy, even though they obliquely involved different political cultures. For these
sectors of public opinion above all, militarism and the war taking shape in
Europe in the early 1910s (the war in Libya offered a magnificent occasion for
militaristic and nationalist enthusiasm as early as 1911) represented an explicit
therapy for masculinity. The exaltation of the warrior was also tied to a general
cultural climate in which problems such as the loss of the virile vigor of
‘lineage’, the demographic problem and therefore the quantitative weakening
of the ‘race’, and the exaltation of the thrilling and ‘dangerous life’ as opposed
to the debilitating monotony of the petty bourgeois existence acquired new
political valence. In many respects the prospect of nationalism provided a sort
of ideological container in which the various (and not always coherent) manly,
misogynous and authoritative impulses could converge and sustain one
another.
In the reality of daily experience, the Great War did not produce the effects
desired by those who hoped it would produce a return to the old gender
hierarchy. Thus it seemed necessary in the postwar period to convince the
masses of disillusioned veterans and men in general, frustrated as men by the far
from triumphant economic and social scenario, that the only way out of the
confusion and insecurity was through the revival of the martial values that had
characterized those terrible years. The principle of hierarchy that represented
the very foundation of military life, together with the decisive value of violent
action, were thus transposed onto peacetime civilian life and political dynamics.
The rise in social conflict eroded what moral scruples remained in conservative
circles about embracing violently repressive and liberticidal options. The
widespread perception of the failure of the political liberal system, with which
the notion of democracy had recently been generally identified, offered new
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Fascism and masculinity
war is something sublime because it forces every man to face the dilemma of
choosing between heroism and cowardice, between the ideal and the
stomach, between the spiritual instinct to project life beyond the material,
and the pure and simple instinct of animal conservation. It is the brutal
discriminator that distinguishes man from man, character from character,
constitution from constitution: on the one side the cowardly, the soft, the
hysterical, the effeminate, the cry-babies, the mommy’s boys; on the other
the strong, the aware, the idealists, the mystics of danger, those who triumph
over fear and those who are courageous by nature, the hot-blooded heroes
and the heroes of the will.5
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Italian masculinities
extreme remedies. The primary and declared goal of a violent restoration of the
threatened social and moral order was the reaffirmation of traditional values and
hierarchies. But there was also the idea – whether indirectly or explicitly
articulated – that a regeneration process would restore lost virility to the man
who embraced violent solution. In order to legitimize violence itself and
therefore render ethically accessible this manly experience to a potentially
unlimited number of men, fascism invoked an eternal and transcendental norm,
one that was above history and thus ontologically antimodern, and of divine or
natural origin: ‘The violence that we are cultivating and warming up within us
with the warmth of our blood is the holy, just and decisive violence to which
natural law and moral law have entrusted the function of supreme judge in the
conflict of ideas, races and programs. Violence is the voice of God. Violence is
the justice of nature.’8
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Fascism and masculinity
religious sentiment, and certainly the virus of the declining birth rate, which
constantly threatened to spread from the already-infected cities to the ‘most
virile’ rural areas.11
Confidential reports sent by provincial authorities highlighted an increasing
reluctance of younger country people to resign themselves to the harsh living
conditions of preceding generations. Women above all considered the flight
from the countryside an opportunity to escape from rigid patriarchal control. In
1935 the provincial party secretary of Modena wrote: ‘The young people who
marry are anxious to break away from the family and make their own families
because the young wives are intolerant of the discipline of the reggitore [head of
the agricultural family] and want to move to the cities so as to have greater
opportunity to enjoy themselves.’12 In the common imagination, the temple of
modern wellbeing naturally was the city; yet once country people became city
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dwellers, they produced fewer children. The result was the attack on the city as
a place of corruption of lineage and the matching exaltation of country purity as
a biological guarantee of the nation. In the preface to Regresso delle nascite,
Richard Korherr’s famous book on the decline of the birth rate, the duce
affirmed that the author’s theory was
The city, technology, comfort and the rhythms of modern life jeopardized
virility because they denied man the benefits of a life in contact with nature,
took his mind off the healthy, eternal struggle against obstacles and material
and moral challenges, prohibited him from tempering his masculinity in an
adventurous existence of continuous dangers and adversities. Themes destined
for wide distribution, the fascination with risk, sacrifice and manly Herculean
labors, together with the myth of the happy life of the peasant, were
undoubtedly fabulous motifs that spoke to individuals frustrated by modern
life. Tormented by anxiety over the artificial and alienating character of daily
existence, middle-class men for decades had been taking refuge in fantasies of
grand and uncontaminated horizons, even from the point of view of gender
identity.14 The prospect of evasion from the daily routine, the city and social
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Italian masculinities
and family rules had played a primary role in the construction of the myth of
the warrior long before fascism; George Mosse has written that in the First
World War ‘the sense of having achieved the freedom ‘‘to be a man’’
through the instrumentality of war was widely shared’ (Mosse 1996: 111).
The exaltation of adventure did not necessarily have to lead to risking one’s
life in the trenches or in combat with the enemy, however. Precisely through
literary mythologies presenting courageous and heroic masculine lives, in fascist
Italy even the meek family father in slippers could escape through fantasy from
a reality that by now seemed devoid of invigorating emotions, and thus
rediscover his own ‘authentic’ masculinity. Popular literature of adventures in
wild and mysterious worlds or the solitary existence of strong men in contact
with nature (from colonial novels to the literary myth of the West, from early
science fiction to the police genre, from Tarzan to Captain Ahab) must be
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Fascism and masculinity
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Italian masculinities
‘The ras is a young, new man. And by youth we mean audacity, candor and
freedom of thought, speech and action; the love of danger, the force of will, the
inclination toward violence, indifference and the exaltation of spirit and
faith.’20 It does not take much to realize that youth here represents a metaphor
having little to do with any real, factual, biographical quality of man. On other
occasions, the term was used in a more classical, generational sense. The fascist
idea of youth merged enthusiasm and maturity, millenary history and the
future, tradition and revolution, as seen in Mario Carli’s novel L’italiano di
Mussolini (1930):
This thirty-year old man had already lived a full existence of profound
experiences, adventures of the spirit and dramas of the flesh, had gambled
with death without ever losing, had enriched his blood with steel shrapnel
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and gun powder, this boy who suddenly, in the first moment of youth,
found in himself the virtues of command and obedience, the capacity to
govern men, lead them to victory and to death, administer substances,
organize sectors of life, encampments, defenses, and collective states of
mind, who then came to know the street, the ambush, the ways and places
of civil war, and the great masters of cunning, through which he learned to
save himself from the political ambushes his adversaries and rivals set for
him; this young man with clear, willful, and sincere eyes, fit to command
and turn fantasy into reality, appeared to him as a completely new human
figure, a fresh model of Italian virility; in order to recognize it, his
imagination had to make great leaps backwards in history.21
The aim of these ‘great leaps backwards’ was also and above all to bypass the era
of the bourgeoisie, to move the hand of time back to the happy age when the
hated bourgeois, this firstborn son of modernity, had not yet been born.
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Fascism and masculinity
does not seem to be accidental: the choice to foreground the bourgeois ‘state of
mind’ (a decidedly volatile concept) indicated that the true objective was to
provoke an emotive effect in the audience, rather than to obtain a concrete
result in line with the message’s literal contents. In the 1938 speech in which he
announced the ‘three blows to the bourgeoisie’, the duce himself emphasized
the importance of making ‘a very clear distinction between capitalism and
bourgeoisie. Because the bourgeoisie can be an economic category, but it is
above all a moral category, a state of mind, a temperament . . . . The
bourgeoisie is a category of political – moral nature’ (Mussolini 1959: 189; see
Ben-Ghiat 2004: 77 – 86; Milza 2000: 775 – 91).
Fascist anti-bourgeois sentiment can be distinguished in two different – and
potentially diverging – attitudes: on the one hand the exaltation of the values of
the countryside, which translated into a ruralistic rhetoric linked to anti-
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urbanism; on the other the contempt for bourgeois conventions and comforts,
in favor of action, movement and unshakable will. The first attitude glorified
stability and tradition; the second, dynamism and adventure. At first glance,
only the former should be classified fully as antimodernism; but if we consider
the two strategies from the point of view of gender, they appear much less
distinct. In both cases, ‘bourgeois’ meant the well-off urbanized man, satisfied
and increasingly desirous of the domestic comforts of modern civilization. Both
positions opposed this enemy in the name of the uncouth male, ready and
willing to sacrifice, endowed with brisk manners, clear and solid ideas, and
volatile, disdainful language. Both also extolled the vigorous male body,
polemically opposed to that of the unfit and cowardly bourgeois. This
exaltation did not lack a homoerotic component of almost sensual satisfaction
in and fascination with the male body as an aesthetic value in itself. Not by
chance, the fraternal community of men was another constant motif in the
representation of a virile, comradely and unselfish sociality, which was opposed
to the hypocritical, egotistical and opportunistic character of relations among
bourgeois men. This representation was clearly laden with an exasperated
misogyny: real men do not need women; rather they disdainfully distance
themselves from them. Contact with the female world was seen as threatening
to diminish virility, the ‘natural’ dimension of which was specifically that
warrior-like, comradely bond among men, the highest possible level of human
relations. Furthermore, the two denigrators of the degenerate bourgeois (the
rural – traditional man and the dynamic – defiant man) were in their ideal
environment only when immersed in the vast expanses of nature or in
adventurous undertakings; closed within cement walls in a sedentary life, both
immediately suffered from the symptoms of masculine decadence.
Because they were so inclined to vast, existential horizons, both anti-
bourgeois tendencies privileged the spiritual dimension of life. The bourgeois
was described as completely unworthy of any noble longing of the spirit and
devoted exclusively to the most narrow-minded and petty materialism.
Satisfied with material well being, he was by definition impervious to the
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Italian masculinities
spiritual values that make the nation glorious: in particular, he disdained the
political duty of fertility because of his petty, craven nature and was absolutely
incapable of any genuine pride of race. On the rhetorical level of the struggle
against the ‘Malthusians’ (a term that probably evoked for most people obscure
threats from far-away planets; we can define it as an example of subliminal
antimodernism), there was an almost natural convergence of interests with
certain Catholic circles, in particular in the final years of the regime. Giuseppe
De Luca, the priest who founded the journal Frontespizio, declared that ‘the
bourgeoisie, of its own nature, is like a procuress. De Luca stated that
‘Christianity is essentially anti-bourgeois . . . . A Christian, a true Christian and
thus a Catholic, is the opposite of a bourgeois.’22
In an Italy still firmly traditional in its socio-economic and cultural
structures, excessively modernist and futurist movements were combated
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Fascism and masculinity
reference was not to a gender neutral figure: who if not a male can be
accused of being ‘an enemy of sport . . . pacifist, pitiful, sanctimonious,
ready to be moved emotionally, always humanitarian, infertile’? Who if not
a husband ‘on Saturday evening talks with his wife about whether they
should conceive a child or not’, calculating if it is worth it economically
(Mussolini 1959: 188)? Equally evident is the masculine nature of a certain
‘tendency toward skepticism, compromise, the comfortable life, careerism,’
which had already been execrated by the duce in 1934, who concisely
concluded: ‘the creed of the fascist is heroism, that of the bourgeois egoism’
(Mussolini 1958: 192).
The mediocrity of the bourgeois in such representations was, in short,
specifically a masculine mediocrity. The greatness, nobility of mind and
ideal vigor lacking in the bourgeois were typically virile, and therefore
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fascist, qualities. The bourgeois, in other words, was recognizable above all
for a veritable deficit of masculinity, which was the essence of his
mediocrity. If, as I have pointed out, the ringing antibourgeois denuncia-
tions were almost always accompanied by statements that greatly blurred any
social references, the rhetorical concreteness of virility was nevertheless not
lost. Processo alla borghesia, a work published in 1939, proposed nothing less
than a trial of the bourgeoisie and ventured to make a subtle distinction
between the average man and the bourgeois. Because of his unmanly
nature, the bourgeois sought to flee from his own impotence through petty,
effeminate, or infantile means:
Middle class, middle man, incapable of great virtue or great vice: and there
would be nothing wrong with that if only he would be willing to remain as
such; but when his childlike or feminine tendency to camouflage pushes
him to dream of grandeur, honors, and thus riches, which he cannot achieve
honestly with his own ‘second-rate’ powers, then the average man
compensates with cunning, schemes, and mischief; he kicks out ethics and
becomes a bourgeois. The bourgeois is the average man who does not
accept to remain such and who, lacking the strength sufficient for the
conquest of essential values – those of the spirit – opts for material ones, for
appearances. (Pavese 1939: 56)
To become bourgeois was still a fault pertaining to the masculine mystique: not
by chance, shortly after, the bourgeois was scornfully defined as someone who
was ‘spiritually castrated’ (Pavese 1939: 59).
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Italian masculinities
The image of women, in order to fully confirm male superiority, not only had
to be subordinate, but also express the immutable nature of that subordination
throughout history. In short, the woman had to confirm that she was the
inferior companion of man in the past, present and always. The traditional
representation of femininity thus constituted a sure foundation on which to
construct the antimodernist discourse: the woman was the living proof of the
persistent nature of the human condition. In this context one can understand
the importance of the glorification of reproduction for the virilistic discourse.
Reproduction, in fact, was presented as a triumph or revenge of Nature over
history and consequently over modernity, which was considered a degenerate
product of history. Similarly, it is possible to understand the crucial importance
of the association of women with Nature and tradition. As a result, the concept
of a ‘modern’ woman literally became a contradiction in terms. As women
were considered, par excellence, the ‘natural’ part of humanity and as nature and
modernity are opposing and irreconcilable concepts, if a woman was modern,
she was no longer a woman and thus could not be considered to belong to the
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Fascism and masculinity
female gender. The true woman, as a fascist era song suggests, is always the
same:
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Italian masculinities
phenomenon that is most visible in all so-called civilized countries’, that of the
‘male decadence and the rise of the woman’ as an effect of the ‘mechanical and
industrial civilization’ (Notari 1998: 13 – 14).26 After the good woman of the
home and the sensual femme fatale, this was precisely a new type of woman who
openly challenged man: she worked all day in an office, nimbly jumped from the
bus to the ‘electric traction’ tram, did not show the necessary respect to her
husband and, because of her various commitments, did not give birth to more
than a pair of children on average. The serious problem of the declining birth
rate – the book was published in 1929 – was mentioned on many pages: the
‘type three’ woman was reluctant about maternity, the responsibility of which
fell to the male.27 In fact, Notari openly accused men of having created this
situation, abdicating their role of command and ceding, over the preceding fifty
years, more and more terrain to women. At this point, he warned dramatically,
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man must decide. If he wants the woman to be fertile, in the Biblical sense
and according to the commands of the Race and the Nation, he alone must
assume, by himself, all the responsibilities of their common sustenance. If
instead he wants the woman to share the burden of work, the risks of his
business, and she is to gain from such sharing, then he must allow the
woman to turn into an element of sterility. (Notari 1998: 92 – 3)
The pro-birth rhetoric of the regime, of which Notari’s book is part, can be
considered a discursive terrain bordering on misogyny, virilism and
antimodernism (Falasca Zamponi 1997: 155 – 62). The anti-bourgeois senti-
ment also played a primary role: while the bourgeoisie lovingly raised not their
children but their lap poodles (as the fascist press reported),28 showing once
again a morbid inclination toward extravagance and a wretched indifference
toward the nation’s destiny, the regime placed its hopes in the men and women
who were not yet corrupted by modern civilization.
Starting with the Discorso dell’Ascensione (Speech on the Ascension), which
Mussolini delivered on 26 May 1927, the demographic question became of
utmost national importance. At stake was the international weight of Italy,
which would never be significant and certainly never equal the imperial
tradition of ancient Rome, if the number of Italians did not increase rapidly.
The link between sexual reproduction and the State thus became one of the
principal canals through which the question of virility and more generally of
traditional gender identities, acquired an extraordinary political and institutional
importance in fascist discourse. Accordingly, the State had new and important
reasons to heighten its own role as judge of the private behavior of men and
women. If the declining birth rate was caused primarily by the negative effects
of modernity, then relentlessly combating these effects became an even more
important task of the regime.
Given the misogynistic, homophobic and virilistic nature of fascist rhetoric,
it is not surprising that the demographic campaign, pioneered in Italy at the end
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Fascism and masculinity
Women’s work . . . is related not just with unemployment but also with the
demographic question. Work, when it is not a direct impediment, distracts
from procreation, foments independence and consequent physical and moral
modes that are contrary to childbirth. Man, disoriented and above all
‘unemployed’ in all senses, ends up renouncing the family . . . . The exodus
of women from the work force would undoubtedly have economic
repercussions for many families, but a legion of men would lift up their
humiliated brow and the number of families immediately entering into the
life of the nation would increase a hundredfold. It is necessary to understand
that the same work that causes the loss of procreational attributes in the
woman, in the man creates a strong physical and moral virility.30
Mario Palazzi, among others, declared that the ‘exaggerated (especially when
taking into consideration the corresponding male unemployment) use of
women’s services in every field’ would feed the ‘female intrusiveness in every
branch of activity’, and thus produce a ‘progressive relaxation of family ties and
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Italian masculinities
of male authority within the bosom of the family, finally leading to matriarchy.
And matriarchy is not virile and even less fascist.’31
The measures the regime took between 1927 and 1938 to exclude women
from some occupations and above all to reduce the female presence in the
overall panorama of paid work, did not produce the hoped-for effects (due
above all to the difficult economic conditions of families, worsened by the
Second World War). More than an actual exclusion of women from work
outside the home, however, the fundamental goal of such measures was to curb
the increasing importance of women in teaching, professional and office work,
and the service industry; much less threatening and much more difficult to
oppose was the presence of women in certain traditional manufacturing sectors
(textile, food, etc.) and above all in the countryside. In reality the regime did
not seem too worried that female factory workers, or – something more
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Conclusion
The widespread anti-modernist rhetoric in fascist Italy was abundantly fueled
by gender language, which was an integral part of the rhetorical effectiveness of
the message. Through the language of masculinity, the male audience was
furnished with guarantees, certainties and reassurances as to the integrity of his
identity and above all as to his virility uncorrupted by modern civilization.
Given that men had been obsessed for decades with the fragility of their virility,
these representations found a particularly receptive audience, sounded
convincing and easily acquired credibility in the male population.
The connection between gender and antimodernism shows the very
importance of the concept of gender in catalyzing a wide consensus among
heterogeneous social spheres. Thanks to its receptivity in a vast number of men,
to whom the virilistic discourse said exactly what they wanted to hear, the code
of masculinity permitted at various historical junctures the successful
transmission of political contents of a different nature. The anti-modernist
rhetoric exploited this capacity fully. At the same time, the collective need to
re-formulate a stable and virile male identity, widespread since the late 1800s,
allowed many men to exploit the essentially metaphoric discursive terrain of
antimodernism, legitimizing their strategies of patriarchal restoration with a
nostalgic exaltation of tradition.
Fascism’s ruralistic, pro-natal and anti-bourgeois campaigns proved to be
unrealistic and ineffectual, or produced results well below expectations.
Nevertheless, the accompanying rhetorical production and the base ideals are
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Fascism and masculinity
therapies for men’s insecurities about their virility have played a major role in
the social integration strategies of recent history. The importance of the role of
masculinity was well understood by the theorists of such strategies, by those
involved in building consensus and by all members of the political élite, from
the most seasoned to the most uncouth. For this reason, questions related to
masculinity deserve to be taken into consideration not only in the context of
gender studies, but also – and more fully – in the context of the historiography
of modern Italian society.
Notes
1 The term antimodernism here conveys a complex combination of behaviors,
representations and languages that express a more or less pronounced suspicion or
even open hostility towards the social and cultural phenomena connected to the
processes of modernization.
2 In this sense the antimodernists par excellence were undoubtedly the men associated
with the journal Il Selvaggio and the Strapaese movement; their identity as writers
and artists, and their more or less hostile relations with other literary and philosophic
circles have made fascist antimodernism a privileged object of research for literary
and cultural history (Ben-Ghiat 2004, Adamson 1995). The most attentive
historians, however, have highlighted the verifiable superimpositions and contra-
dictions in the various positions, considering the modernism – antimodernism
polarity as a pair of relatively abstract extremes, or even as ‘generic labels’ not to be
taken too literally: see Cannistraro (1975: 58). An important analysis on the
relationship between antimodernism and fascist masculinity is provided by Wanrooij
(1997: 379 – 439).
3 For reasons of space I will not discuss here other important questions such as
homophobia and the persecution of homosexuality. A more general (though
concise) examination of masculinity during the fascist period is found in Bellassai
(2004: 76 – 98). See also Passerini (1991: 99 – 109).
4 For example, the young Italian men who at the turn of the century practiced
mountaineering and organized group excursions that pre-emptorily excluded
women were seeking relief from the distressing sensation of being ‘no longer not so
much men as robots laboriously pressed by the thousands of tentacles of marvelous
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Italian masculinities
machines’. Paolo Monelli, ‘Tendopoli’, Rivista mensile del Club Alpino Italiano, 10
(1914), cited in Papa (2004: 36).
5 Mario Carli, L’italiano di Mussolini (1930) in Gazzola Stacchini (1991: 494 – 5). Italics
in the original. On Carli, see Passerini (1991: 110 ff).
6 For a contextualization of the fascist action squads within the postwar masculine
crisis, see Wanrooij (1990: 210 ff).
7 Mino Maccari, ‘Squadrismo’, Il Selvaggio 1(1), 13 July 1924: 1.
8 Mino Maccari, ‘Parla il Selvaggio – 4’, Il Selvaggio, 1(12), 28 September 1924: 2.
9 Zunino (1985: 309). For a fuller discussion of ruralism, see Isnenghi (1991).
10 Soffici (1921: 22). On ruralist rhetoric, beginning with the ‘Battle of grain’ launched
in 1925, see Falasca Zamponi (1997: 149 – 55).
11 An important scholar of Mussolini’s language has sustained that ‘three registers of the
Strapaese motif are present in Mussolini’s speeches: there is the personal boast that
he, too, is a son of the land, there is the allusion – through the praise of country
people – of the differing behavior of city dwellers and factory workers; and there is
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the declaration that the level of authenticity of the Italian race is in direct relation to
the rate of ruralism and fertility.’ Simonini (2003: 116).
12 Report of the federal secretary of Modena, 29 March 1935, cited in Colarizi (2000:
103).
13 On the apocalyptic representation of the city in fascist rhetoric see also Horn (1994,
ch. 5), ‘The Sterile City’ (for the relationship between urbanism and degeneration
with particular regard to gender, see pp. 96 – 9).
14 Regarding the USA, see Rotundo (1993: 258 – 9; 184 – 5 and 357, note 36).
15 Cited in Gramsci (1975: 2128). Burzio’s article on popular literature and in
particular the Three Musketeers, was published in La Stampa on 22 October 1930 and
reprinted in Italia letteraria 2(45), 9 November 1930: 706.
16 G. Gamberini, ‘Sistematizzare la fede’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 4 April 1928, cited in La
Rovere (2002: 61).
17 Ellevı̀, ‘Istituto familiare e femminismo’, Gerarchia, 19(5), May 1939: 332.
18 Il Selvaggio no. 1, ‘Gazzettino’, Il Selvaggio, 10(8), 30 November 1933: 58. Emphasis
mine. See Marino (1983: 109 – 10).
19 On the use of symbolism connected to youth in art between the two wars, see
Malvano (1994). More broadly, on the importance of youthful rhetoric in fascist
culture, see Passerini (1994) and Ben-Ghiat (2004: 125 – 63). On the connection
between youth and the therapy of virility in the ‘1914 generation’, see Mosse (1990),
in particular ch. 4, ‘The young and the experience of the war.’
20 Sugo-di-bosco, ‘Il segreto per cuocere i ceci ovvero vogliamo settanta ras’, Il
Selvaggio, II(19), 25 May 1925: 1.
21 Mario Carli, L’italiano di Mussolini (1930), in Gazzola Stacchini (1991: 493).
22 Giuseppe De Luca, ‘Il cristiano come un antiborghese’, Frontespizio, February 1939,
cited in Marino (1983: 153). See also Dau Novelli (1994: 25 – 52).
23 Romano Romanelli, ‘Considerazioni sul nostro Popolo’, Il Selvaggio 4(13 – 14), 30
July 1929: 3.
24 Bel Amı̀-Bellei, Le donne di tutte le età, n.p., cited in Cavallo and Iaccio (1988: 337 –
8).
25 Paolo Ardali, La politica demografica di Mussolini, Casa Ed. ‘‘Mussolinia’’, Mantua,
1929, cited in Meldini (1975: 162). According to David Horn, ‘the virility of the
social body, like that of the individual male, was seen to depend crucially on women’
(Horn 1994: 65).
26 The opposition to industrial civilization was not, however, exclusive to men: see
Lombroso (1930: 241 – 3, 247 – 8).
27 ‘Of course the ‘‘type three’’ woman bears a significant responsibility in the
recognized and universal decline of the birth rate. And how to blame her? Who
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Fascism and masculinity
called the woman to her present-day economic dynamism? Man. Who induced and
persuades her to train and prepare herself on a terrain that is certainly not the most
appropriate – according to Nature and tradition – for the delicacy of her organism
and sensitivity? Man . . . . And so how to pretend that the woman work, earn,
provide for herself, love, marry and also bear children? Not to fear. Man does not
have any such pretence; on the contrary, he adapts fairly willingly to the sterility or
semi-sterility desired by his companion, the more so in that the yields of her financial
collaboration can continue longer. This is perhaps the epicenter of the grand
demographic drama that is tormenting the white race’ (Notari 1998: 63).
28 ‘Still speaking of examples, certainly one of the most nauseating phenomena
regarding the declining birth rate is that of the well-off classes – the high and fat
bourgeoisie – who, as an article in Popolo d’Italia notes, ‘‘they show us their buildings
and luxurious apartments, empty of children and populated with dogs and bitches’’.’
‘Stato fascista e famiglia fascista’, Critica fascista, 15(8), 15 February 1937: 113
(unsigned editorial). The article referred to in the Popolo d’Italia appeared on 30
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January 1937. On the anti-bourgeois tones of the pro-birth rhetoric, see Wanrooij
(1986: 48).
29 Manlio Pompei, ‘La Famiglia e il Fascismo: un’inchiesta da fare’, Critica fascista, 9(9),
1 May 1933: 164.
30 Benito Mussolini, ‘Macchina e donna’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 31 August 1934, cited in
Macciocchi (1976: 145).
31 Mario Palazzi, ‘Autorità dell’uomo’, Critica fascista, 9(10), 15 May 1933: 183.
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