Angelo Tasca, a pivotal figure in 20th-century Italian political history, and indeed European history, is frequently overshadowed by his Fascist opponent Mussolini or his Socialist and Communist ...colleagues (Gramsci and Togliatti). Yet, as Emanuel Rota reveals in this captivating biography, Tasca--also known as Serra, A. Rossi, Andre Leroux, and XX--was in fact a key political player in the first half of the 20th century and an ill-fated representative of the age of political extremes he helped to create. In A Pact with Vichy, readers meet the Italian intellect and politician with fresh eyes as the author demystifies Tasca's seemingly bizarre trajectory from revolutionary Socialist to Communist to supporter of the Vichy regime. Rota demonstrates how Tasca, an indefatigable cultural operator and Socialist militant, tried all his life to maintain his commitment to scientific analysis in the face of the rise of Fascism and Stalinism, but his struggle ended in a personal and political defeat that seemed to contradict all his life when he lent his support to the Vichy government. Through Tasca's complex life, A Pact with Vichy vividly reconstructs and elucidates the even more complex networks and debates that animated the Italian and French Left in the first half of the 20th century. After his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party as a result of his refusal to conform to Stalinism, Tasca reinvented his life in Paris, where he participated in the intense political debates of the 1930s. Rota explores how Tasca's political choices were motivated by the desperate attempt to find an alternative between Nazism and Stalinism, even when this alternative had the ambiguous borders of Vichy's collaborationist regime. A Pact with Vichy uncovers how Tasca's betrayal of his own ideal was tragically the result of his commitment to political realism in the brief age of triumphant Fascism. This riveting, perceptive biography offers readers a privileged window into one of the 20th century's most intriguing yet elusive characters. It is a must-read for history buffs, students, and scholars alike.
In the age of the Industrial Revolution, European intellectuals started to look for an explanation of southern Europe's economic underdevelopment. In order to explain this unequal development, ...Montesquieu found help in the mercantilist theories that maintained that only necessity forces workers to work, creating a system wherein Nature, rather than human calculation, made people industrious or lazy. The idea that only a minimum salary could exact work from workers, without producing laziness, became, for Montesquieu, the idea that the scarcity of natural resources had created a race of productive northern Europeans, forcing them to be industrious. This narrative created a powerful racial incentive threat for northern workers: refusing the new work ethic, demanded by the new capitalist organization of labor, became a sign of “Italian,” “Spanish,” and “oriental” behavior.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Ferrara, Giorgio Bassani’s hometown, appeared as a successful case of integration between Italian majorities and minorities. In the local dimension of Italy’s ...small city life, politeness, mannerisms and personal contacts seemed to provide the key to the successful conclusion of the emancipation of the Italian Jewry. Giorgio Bassani provided a mimetic portrayal of Ferrara’s social rituals and of their ultimate failure to preserve the illusion of a common fatherland for all Italians. This article looks at Bassani’s realist representation of Ferrara’s sociability through the use of phatic expressions, chronotopes, and local tropes to debunk the myth that Bassani was a nostalgic apologist for provincial Italy. The ultimate failure of Ferrara to prevent the mass murder of its Jewish citizens emerges, in Bassani’s work, not as the result of external forces, but from the inadequacy of its social strategy to create a real community among its citizens.
At the beginning of November 1938 the Reale Accademia d'Italia, the official cultural institution of the Italian Fascist regime, organized a conference on Africa. Mussolini himself had chosen the ...theme for the conference and major Italian political figures, such as De Vecchi and Balbo, delivered papers, together with French, English and German politicians and scholars. The conference, organized in the same year of Hitler's visit to Italy and of the introduction of the new racial laws, could have offered the cultural justification for a foreign policy alternative to the German turn taken by the regime. Only Mussolini's last minute decision not to attend transformed the Convegno Volta on Africa from a potential alternative foreign policy into a forum where the dissenting voices within the regime voiced their opposition to German style racism.
Explores the role that the representation of southern Europe as a land of surplus and laziness played, since the early stages of the industrialization of northern Europe, in providing both a moral ...compensation and a quasi-racial threat to the workers of northern Europe who were pressured to abandon older attitudes toward work and embrace a new relation between industriousness and surplus. IBSSMB Reprinted by permission of University of Minnesota Press
On September 3, 1944, Angelo Tasca spent the day in his apartment in Vichy, writing in his diary. At night, three young men knocked on his door.¹ One of them, who identified himself as Captain ...Chartons (or Chartrons), said that Tasca was under arrest and that they had come to take him to prison. Tasca noticed that they were armed with submachine guns and displayed a foulard with the colors of the French flag. When Tasca asked to see the warrant for his arrest, the captain replied rather harshly that he did not need to provide any explanation. After this
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