Mussolini"s rise to power

Constellations, 2008

The current article tries to explain the origins of Mussolini's Fascism and his foreign policy doctrine, by examining the political and ideological contexts of pre-Fascist Italy. This approach offers a wider analysis of the general conditions which enabled the surge of Mussolini's Far-right movement, such as the political instability, the fear of Communism

Annali d'Italianistica 41 , 2023

Contemporary European History, 2021

Nations and Nationalism, 2009

But Marconi does finally relocate to Italy, roughly at the time Mussolini comes to power. And Raboy devotes the last of the book's five sections to this often neglected (or sanitized) phase of Marconi's life. Indeed, Raboy has the courage, and the archival documents, to challenge the euphemisms and silences that have marked other studies, in Italian and English, of Marconi's later life. He explores Marconi and D'Annunzio's mutual admiration, Marconi's negotiations with the Vatican (especially in relation to a desired divorce, but also around the propaganda possibilities of wireless), and his compromises with Mussolini and the Italian scientific community (chapter 31 is entitled, 'A Servant of the Regime'). Already a senator, Marconi accumulates new titles and leadership roles that can, Raboy shows, scarcely be dismissed as ceremonial. This is some of Raboy's most provocative analysis, striking only a few dissonant notes, as when he devotes several pages to the question of whether Marconi was personally anti-Semitic and might have supported the racial laws of 1938 (he instead died in 1937). The evidence seems equivocal, at least much more ambiguous than Marconi's enthusiastic embrace of racist projects in Ethiopia. But we may also be inclined to ask whether this is the right (or most pressing) question to ask. Racial sciences and legislation (in Italy as elsewhere) were, after all, more than the product of individuals' ill will toward Jews and others; they also had their roots in the bio-political logics that informed Mussolini's demographic campaign and the colonization of East Africa. Here, we might say, the projects of the historian and the biographer begin to diverge. But they never drift very far apart, and Raboy mostly resists psychologizing. In fact, it is only in the final pages of the book that the author suggests Marconi suffered from cycles of depression for much of his life, and that was something 'was missing in his emotional development ' (p.675). Perhaps an earlier mention would have encouraged another kind of neat and tidy reading of the complex life that unfolds in the pages of this wonderful book. Instead we learn to be satisfied (and very) with unresolved questions, ambiguity, contradiction, even muck.