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  • Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic
  • Anthony L. Cardoza
Italian Vices: Nation and Character from the Risorgimento to the Republic. By Silvana Patriarca (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010) 288 pp. $95.00

In the early 1990s, a perfect storm of intellectual and political circumstances (which included a major shift in methodological fashions within the historical profession), the end of the Cold War, and the sudden implosion of the principal mass parties on the peninsula, combined to spark a remarkable resurgence of scholarly interest in the identity of the Italian nation, its characteristics, and its ostensible fragility. Patriarca’s theoretically sophisticated and deeply researched history of the discourse of national character in Italy represents one of the most impressive achievements of this resurgence. Although those acquainted with Christopher Duggan’s The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy Since 1796 (New York, 2007), Alberto Banti’s La nazione del Risorgimento (Turin, 2000), or Patriarca’s previously published essays will be familiar with many of the book’s arguments, the sharper focus of Italians Vices allows Patriarca to offer a more complex exploration of how the supposed defects of Italian character have shaped the country’s political and social discourses during the past two centuries. Her subtle use of linguistic analysis and gender theory makes the book a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.

Patriarca dissects the rhetoric and tropes of national character in accord with a standard periodization of modern Italian history; different vices take center stage at different moments of crisis. Her book begins with the Risorgimento in the early nineteenth century, when patriotic artists and writers discursively constructed the idea of Italy. From the outset, these architects of national identity tended to reproduce, internalize, and embellish foreign stereotypes of Italian vices. Thus, they lamented, in particular, the “effeminate” indolence of Italians, a vice that they ascribed less to nature, climate, or race than to the emasculating effects of foreign occupation and indigenous despotism during the peninsula’s long decline from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Both moderate and democratic patriots linked the nation-building project to the moral regeneration of the Italian people.

With the emergence of a unified nation state in 1861, invidious comparisons with other “more advanced” nations like Germany and Britain increasingly framed the discourse on national character. By the late nineteenth century, fashionable pseudo-scientific theories of Latin race and ethnicity had supplanted historical developments as causal agents in the discourse on Italian vices, as pessimistic educated elites [End Page 651] sought to understand the growth of socialism, parliamentary paralysis, the “Southern Question,” and the country’s colonial failures. More ominously, in the decades prior to 1914, new nationalist intellectuals began to promote war to redeem past humiliations and to transform undisciplined, inefficient, and effeminate Italians into a heroic and virile people. Once Italy had entered World War I, the “moral problems of national character,” rather than failures of political or military leadership, served to explain battlefield setbacks like that of Caporetto in 1917.

Patriarca shows how both fascists and anti-fascists employed the rhetoric of flawed national character to attack their adversaries and advance their respective political agendas in the decades after World War I. While many of her conclusions about Benito Mussolini and his regime cover ground that other scholars of fascist culture have already tilled, she highlights important discursive continuities between the black shirts and both their pre-war predecessors and their contemporary political adversaries. Thus, the perception of the inadequacy or inferiority of Italians present in the rhetoric of liberal elites also informed Mussolini’s project to create a “new fascist man” in ways that had no counterpart in Adolf Hitler’s regime, in which the Nazis assumed the fundamental health and racial purity of the German people. For their part, Mussolini’s intellectual adversaries also relied on tropes of national character, treating fascism as the product of Italian vices. Not surprisingly, the country’s disastrous experience in World War II provided a new occasion for the mobilization of multiple narratives of collective virtues and vices. Although unrepentant fascists attributed the military debacle to the character failings of Italians, a broad array of antifascist...

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