RISULTATI RICERCA

This article surveys Davide Rodogno’s latest essay (Il nuovo ordine mediterraneo: le politiche di occupazione dell’Italia fascista in Europa, 1940-1943, Bollati Boringhieri, Torino, 2003) mainly taking into account the part referring specifically to the racial policy in the italian-occupied zone of southern France. Reviewing the latest studies on the subject by Klaus Voigt, Michele Sarfatti and Rodogno himself, it suggests there might be a dissonance between the severe conclusions these works imply, and the oral history documentation acquired in the last 20 years, the vaste amount of memoirs available today, which instead seem increasingly to confirm the tolerant and humanitarian attitude held by Italian troops. Behind this, there might be a problem of source criticism: that is, a rather misleading interpretation of the material today available. The new documents published by Rodogno, and formerly by Sarfatti, do not attest any case of jews actually being handed over to Germans between November 1942 and September 1943, but a continuous, obsti¬nate, perhaps even cunning dilating strategy which lasted until the eve of the Armistice. Without falling into the anthropological simplifications which, for example, characterized Jonathan Steinberg’s essay (All or Nothing, Routledge, London, 1990), the article questions the nature of such an odd attitude, framing it within the wider context of the events of summer 1943, as Italy begins to move away from the harsh oppressive policy of Nazism and of the collaborationist government of Vichy. In appendix an unpublished document from the Administrative Departmental Archive of Nice.

The public debate in the United States on the use of war is very strong as late. Several political scientists and historians are tackling this touchy issue in the recent literature on the international role of the Unites States after September 11. The article is a historiographic appraisal of the subject and concentrates especially on the discussion between the bushites and the liberals in the past two years. After an overview of the general approach historians had on the issue of war and peace, the author delves into the more recent debate raised by the policy of the so called volcanoes, Bush’s military advisors. Although comparing the attitudes of hawks and doves, of neo-cons and liberals, the essay shows how these categories do not necessarily apply to the present situation. Moreover it highlights the relevance of domestic politics in the decision concerning international affairs. From Joseph Nye’ soft power to Robert Kagan’s confrontation between the U.S. and Europe, the author concentrates on what political experts Daalder and Lindsay have called The Bush revolution in foreign policy. Although an apparent break with the traditional approach of the U.S. to international politics, Bush’s security advisors’ approach can be traced back to other examples of American foreign policy strategies.

French historiography on peace and war has undergone a significant evolution over the last twenty years. On the basis of George Mosse’s suggestions, World War One has been studied by Péronne historians as an event that represents a «matrix» that has given rise to all the subsequent forms of violence that have occurred in other conflicts. The Second World War has been the object of much debate and interpretation. In particular, much attention has been devoted to the Vichy regime and its protagonists, the Resistance movement, the Liberation and the Shoah. Even the process of decolonisation and the wars that accompanied it has interested French historians. In the French historiographic production, peace includes the concept of the end of war, war as grievance and remembering the events of wars. Military history, which has been profoundly renovated, has allowed a further development of historiographical production, which is firmly rooted in the European perspective.

As a taylor, the historian cuts the periods of the history through the identification of the events which have produced a cleavage, transforming a continuum in a series of sequences. The division of history in several periods is not a simple technical expedient, but an essential part of the historical knowledge. Only contemporary history can avoid the difficulties and the risk of an arbitrary operation, but only coming back to a stricter definition, closer to the original meaning. It will be then possible to define contemporary history every sequence of the past with surviving protagonists or witness. So we have the objective begining of it in a dynamic perspective which it produces new categories, such as the one of generation. Although it creates new problems but also new possibilities for the contemporary historian. In particular, he can hamdle a good number and variety of sources; among these, the direct testimony is particularly fertile. Historian can take advantage from it, also for the rescue of a correct epistemolo¬gy that, through the knowledge of the intentions and the reasons originating human actions, sets the facts free from the slavery of a rigorous rationality (that comes out from supposing the intentions as we know the facts) and puts back in the history the dimension of contingent.

This essay deals with the origins and initial steps in the parallel evolution of three noteworthy writers and thinkers of the XXth century: the dandy turned Fascist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle; the Surrealist then militant Communist Louis Aragon and the aesthete, revolutionary and finally Gaullist minister André Malraux. Each of them represents a particular brand of the climate that transformed France between the two World Wars from the laboratory of modern thinking, as it had largely been before 1914, into the playground of conflicting ideologies shaped elsewhere: in Moscow, Rome, Berlin, and from the infant movement of liberation in South East Asia to the Spanish civil War. Heightened political activity was not a monopoly held by French intellectuals, but in the 1920s and 1930s both the extreme Right and Left increased under the pressure of totalitarian systems whose appeal shook the foundations of the Third Republic, already weakened by the toll of the Great War. Drieu, Aragon and Malraux evolved through this landscape, embodying the anxieties of their times, bringing to fruition the concept of literature engagée that is still current to-day. What makes their experien¬ce still fascinating for contemporary readers is the very close political, intellectual and emotional relationship amongst them and surrounding them. Their divergent paths were constantly interwoven with each other. Their far-reaching but often blurred vision should therefore be examined against the background of a world in the making and undoing. This is the first chapter in a lengthy study that the author has devoted to those three separate brothers and their meaning in an age like ours, only apparrently emancipated from the plight of ideologies.

Fascism proclaimed to be a religious movement and many scholars today look at it as one of the totalitarian political religions of the 20th century. Did Italian Catholics perceive this aspect of the regime and did they feel Fascism as a religious danger? The essay examines a wide range of sources (newspapers, journals, books) and tries to specify the main different trends and phases in Catholic attitude: the dispute of the ’20s against the pagan State, the discussion, after the Conciliazione of 1929, on the religious nature of the Fascist totalitarian State, the persuasion that Nazism and Communism were both part of a common neo-pagan phenomenon, both forms of a new modern idolatry. For a long time, however, the idea of neo-paganism led to distinguish Italian Fascism from other political religions: Catholic analysts asserted that the difference between Fascism and Nazism lay exactly in the fact that Fascism, unlike Nazism, was not an antichristian religion. Nevertheless, at the end of the ’30s, with the growing friendship between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and the introduction of racism, eminent members of the clergy begun to consider pagan idolatry the most dangerous enemy for the Church, including Fascism in their condemnation. At the same time, Catholic interpretations viewed the religious dimension of Fascism more as a possible future menace (dangerously alive in some currents of the Pnf) than as the real nature of the Mussolini’s regime.