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Recent Works on Nineteenth-and Twentieth-Century Italian History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Tobias Abse
Tobias Abse
Affiliation:
New Hall, Cambridge
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Type
Review Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , December 1984 , pp. 1019 - 1036
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 Kaplan, Temma, Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903 (Princeton, 1977)Google Scholar; Mintz, Jerome R., The Anarchists of Casas Viejas (London, 1983)Google Scholar; Snowden, Frank M., ‘Violence and social order; landlord and peasant in Apulia 1900–1922’, paper delivered in Cambridge on 17 02 1982Google Scholar. Brenan, Gerald, The Spanish Labyrinth, an account of the social and political background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 1943)Google Scholar is to some extent responsible for mythologizing the Andalusian class structure amongst those having no detailed knowledge of Spain.

2 Blok, Anton, The mafia of a Sicilian village 1860–1960: a study of violent peasant entrepreneurs (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar; Jane, and Schneider, Peter, Culture and political economy in Western Sicily (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

3 Laslett, Peter, The world we have lost, (London, 1965)Google Scholar, which set out to be a pioneering work of historical sociology, contains many generalizations about early modern England based on data from widely differing areas and periods. The most cogent critique is Hill, Christopher, ‘A one class society?’ in Change and continuity in 17th century England (London, 1974)Google Scholar. MacFarlane, Alan, The origins of English individualism; the family, property and social transition (Oxford, 1978) has excited even more controversyGoogle Scholar; see for example Hilton, Rodney, ‘Individualism and the English peasantry’, New Left Review (03–04 1980), pp. 109–11Google Scholar.

4 Mintz, , The Anarchists of Casas Viejas, which deals with much more than the uprising of 01 1933Google Scholar.

5 Arlacchi makes no use of any documentary material on Calabria of the kind that his translator Jonathan Steinberg has found in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome. Whether there is archival material at the provincial or municipal level that would have any relevance to the matters studied by Arlacchi is unknown to the present reviewer. Archival material from the Archivio Comunale of Genuardo and the Archivio di Stato di Palmero certainly proved very useful to Blok's local study.

6 In fairness it must be admitted that Arlacchi does use a little oral evidence when discussing the mafia of the plain of Gioia Tauro, but this is not integral to his method or his arguments. Oral evidence is an integral part of the social anthropological methodology used by Blok and the Schneiders, who got round the difficulty of finding local informants in mafia areas by not attributing remarks to named individuals and even giving false names to the agro-towns about which they wrote. Oral evidence has been used by a number of historians writing about the recent Italian past such as Luisa Passerini on the Torinese working class, Giovanni Contini on the Officine Galileo in Florence and Roger Absalom on the Resistance in Tuscany.

7 Arlacchi makes no use of the historical literature on Calabria. Without making any pretence to having assembled a comprehensive list, it must be pointed out that the following works all deal with Arlacchi's period: Spezzano, F., La lotta politico in Calabria (1861–1925) (Manduria, 1968)Google Scholar; Spezzano, F., Fascismo e antifascismo in Calabria (Manduria, 1975)Google Scholar; Misefari, Enzo, Le lotte contadine in Calabria nel periodo 1914–1922, (Milan, 1972)Google Scholar, Misefari, Enzo and Marzotti, Antonio, L'avvento del fascismo in Calabria (Cosenza, 1980)Google Scholar and Carvello, Antonio, Fascismo e classi contadine in Calabria I: 1922–1924 in Laveglia, Pietro (ed.), Mezzogiorno e fascismo (Naples, 1978), 1, 513–78Google Scholar.

8 Shanin, Teodor, The awkward class; political sociology of a developing society: Russia 1910–1925 (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar.

9 The reason for the comparison with Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia is twofold. There is a similarity in the chronological period being studied, even if Gonzalez ends earlier, and Andalusian anarchism like Romagnol anarchism and Romagnol socialism originated in a split within the local republican movement. The major distinction between the political history of the two regions is that the Andalusian revolutionaries achieved a much closer linkage with large numbers of workers, artisans and peasants than their Romagnol counterparts and were therefore much less dependent on the personal followings of individual chieftains.

10 Webster, Richard, Industrial imperialism in Italy 1908–1915 (London, 1975)Google Scholar.

11 Stone, Norman, European transformed 1878–1919 (Glasgow, 1983)Google Scholar; Magraw, Roger, France 1815–1914: The bourgeois century (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar.

12 For the first of these new bitter and long-drawn-out confrontations, that of 1911 at Piombino and the island of Elba, see Bianconi, Pietro, Il movimento operaio a Piombino (Florence, 1970), pp. 47–63Google Scholar; Favilli, Paolo, Capitalismo e classe operaia a Piombino 1861–1918 (Rome, 1974), pp. 164–95Google Scholar; Spadoni, Ugo, Capitalismo industriale e movimento operaio a Livomo e all' Isola d' Elba (1880–1913) (Florence, 1979), pp. 353–91Google Scholar.

13 The spontaneous character of a lot of the working-class discontent of 1913 and the concern with control over working conditions and the production process itself are very similar to the developments in Turin, described in Maione, Giuseppe, Il biennio rosso: Autonomia e spontaneità operaia nel 1919–1920 (Bologna, 1975)Google Scholar, and in Livorno, , described in my local study, ‘The political struggle in Livorno 1918–1922: The rise of fascism in a socialist stronghold’, Cambridge Ph.D. 1983, especially pp. 86–124Google Scholar. One of the most interesting features of both periods is a demand for wage settlements that reduced differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in the same plant. The recurrence of these demands, which militated against the sectional interests of the skilled workers but had the firm support of those whose privileges would be eroded, show that the syndicalist movement had an extremely advanced political content, that it cannot be dismissed as primitive, sectionalist or economistic.

14 Maione, Il biennio rosso.

15 Merli, Stefano, Proletariate di fabbrica e capitalismo industriale, Il caso Italiano 1880–1900 (Florence, 1972)Google Scholar.

16 Obviously, it is undeniable that some of the syndicalist labour organizers themselves, such as Bianchi, Pasella and Rossoni, ended up as fascists, but this second wave of defections was not a phenomenon of the primo anteguerra. The decomposition of syndicalism occurred in stages: the established intellectuals left before the marginal ones who depended on the workers for their income. Degl'Innocenti, pp. 101–29 is a model of historical objectivity when compared with the demonological approach to syndicalism exemplified by Tognarini, Ivan, Fascismo, antifascismo, resistenza in una città operaia, Vol. I: Piombino dalla guerra al crollo del fascismo (1918–1943) (Florence, 1980)Google Scholar. Tognarini would have been well advised to consider the activities of the Piombinese anarchosyndicalist movement in the context of an inter-provincial struggle between USI and the ILVA trust with ramifications in the provinces of Arezzo, Grosseto, Livorno and Terni, instead of gratuitously accusíng them of Bakuninism. I am grateful to Mr Carl Levy of the Open University School of Education for providing me with information on this struggle.

17 Lotti, Luigi, La settimana rossa (Florence, 1965)Google Scholar.

18 Fatica, Michele, Origini del fascismo e del comunismo a Napoli 1911–1915 (Florence, 1971), pp. 109–91Google Scholar provides us with the only description of the settimana rossa in a particular city that can be said to go beyond Lotti's work on the national level. Even Fatica's Bordígan bias is a refreshing contrast to the innumerable works saturated by the dogmas of orthodox communism and in any case it is held in severe check by his obsessive devotion to primary sources.

19 Maier, Charles S., Recasting bourgeois Europe: Stabilisation in France, Germany and Italy in the decade after World War I (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar, was the first serious attempt to relate the economics and politics of the period, at least as far as Italy was concerned, and exerted a notable influence on the work of Anthony L. Cardoza and Alice Kelikian, who adopted many of Maier's theories about the role of interest groups and corporatism.

20 De Grand, Alexander, The Italian Nationalist Association and the rise of fascism in Italy (London, 1978)Google Scholar.

21 De Grand, Alexander, Bottai e la cultura fascista (Rome, 1978)Google Scholar.

22 Cassels, Alan, Fascist Italy (London, 1969)Google Scholar. Wiskemann, Elizabeth, Fascism in Italy: its development and influence (London, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Carocci, Giampiero, Italian fascism (Harmondsworth, 1974)Google Scholar.

23 Roberts, David, The syndicalist tradition and Italian fascism (Manchester, 1979)Google Scholar and De Grazia, Victoria, The culture of consent: mass organisation of leisure in fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Germino, Dante, The Italian fascist party in power (Minneapolis, 1959)Google Scholar.

25 Preziosi, Anna Maria, Borghesia e fascismo in Friuli negli anni 1920–1922 (Rome 1980), pp. 193—206Google Scholar shows that of 539 classifiable members of the Udineseyiirao in 1922, 5.6% belonged to the upper bourgeoisie, 19.7% to the middle bourgeoisie, 48% to the petty bourgeoisie and 26% to the proletariat. Cavandoli, Rolando, Le origini del fascismo a Reggio Emilia 1919–1923 (Rome, 1972), pp. 131–35Google Scholar shows that of 622 classifiable squadristi of the province of Reggio Emilia, 9.9% were from the ceto padronale, 71% from the ceto medio and 19.1 % from the lower classes.

26 Nello, Paolo, ‘L'evoluzione economico-sociale, la struttura agraria, le origini del fascismo a Bologna (1880–1920): Breve note a proposito di due recenti pubblicazioni’, Storia Contemporanea, 1981, pp. 444–62Google Scholar tried to argue that Bolognese fascism had a mass base amongst the urban and rural ceti medi rather than being dependent on the agrari and bitterly attacked Onofri, Nazario Sauro, La strage di palazzo d Accursio; Origine e nascita del fascismo bolognese 1919–1920 (Milan, 1980)Google Scholar for its emphasis on the agrari's desire for revenge against the braccianti and mezzadri. Paolo Nello, who is working on a biography of Dino Grandi, is inclined to treat Grandi as a serious political thinker whose ideas deserve close analysis rather than as an intelligent opportunist who hitched his star to the agrarians in the same way as Balbo in Ferrara or Farinacci in Cremona. The rural ceti medi may have played a more important role in other Po Valley provinces, see Gentile's, Emilio ‘La crisi del socialismo e la nascita del fascismo nel mantovano’ Storia Contemporanea 1979, pp. 633–96Google Scholar.

27 It would be extremely interesting to compare Cardoza's account with Masulli, Ignazio, Crisi e trasformazione; Strutture economiche, rapporti socialie lotte politiche nel Bolognese (1880–1914) (Bologna, 1980)Google Scholar, but the present reviewer has not had the opportunity of seeing it and has only read the summary contained in Paolo Nello's article, which is so keen to argue in favour of the importance of the ceti medi that it cannot be treated as objective.

28 Onofri, La strage di palazzo d'Accursio, especially chapters 6 and 9.

29 Examples of tendentious generalizations that owe more to agrarian whining than to evidence can be found on pp. 274, 286 and 309.

30 For Ferrara, see primarily Corner, Paul, Fascism in Ferrara 1915–1925 (Oxford, 1975)Google Scholar and to a lesser extent Roveri, Alessandro, Dal sindicalismo rivoluzionario al fascismo: Capitalismo agrario e socialismo nel Ferrarese (1870–1920) (Florence, 1972)Google Scholar and Le origini del fascismo a Ferrara 1918–1921 (Milan, 1974). Cardoza freely acknowledges the importance of Corner's work in influencing the type of questions he put to his Bolognese evidence.

31 Cavandoli, Rolando, Le origini del fascismo a Reggio Emilia 1919–1923 (Rome, 1972), pp. 161–209 deals with this process in Reggio EmiliaGoogle Scholar

32 Cavandoli, Rolando, Le origini del fascismo a Reggio Emilia 1919–1923 (Rome, 1972)Google Scholar; Roveri, Alessandro, Le origini del fascismo a Ferrara 1918–1921 (Milan, 1974)Google Scholar; Vaini, Mario, Le origini del fascismo a Mantova (Rome, 1961)Google Scholar; Demers, Francis J., Le origini del fascismo a Cremona (Rome, 1980), are the most obvious examplesGoogle Scholar.

33 Davidson, Alastair, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an intellectual biography (London, 1977) is one of the best works on Gramsci as a theoristGoogle Scholar.

34 Amyot, Grant, The Italian communist party: the crisis of the Popular Front strategy (London, 1981)Google Scholar, has a different focus devoting five of its thirteen chapters to studies of the party in particular localities and emphasizing divisions within the leadership, rather than expounding the victorious official line. Amyot is more sympathetic to the defeated and marginalized Ingrao left than to Berlinguer's centre faction, and is therefore capable of taking a greater critical distance from the policies the PCI pursued in the 1970s.

35 Allum, Percy, Politics and Society in postwar Naples (Cambridge, 1973)Google Scholar.

36 Theories of clientelismo are very much in flux as the conference on Christian Democracy and Clientelismo held in Cambridge on 4 June 1983 clearly demonstrated. Percy Allum does not accept the validity of a number of Chubb's criticisms, whilst Nicholas Smart, currently engaged in a study of the Sicilian city of Ragusa, appears to be challenging all the established orthodoxies, arguing that the considerable conceptual confusion between patronage, corporatism and clientelismo have marred previous studies.

37 The mechanisms through which the DC derives its strength in other areas of Italy are very different, as Percy Allum's illuminating paper on Christian Democracy in Vicenza at the Cambridge conference so rightly pointed out.