This is something - not Mussolini's opinion, but the Fascist interpretation of the Risorgimento - that I wrote a few words about some four hundred days ago. Of course, I have since then failed to edit it into something less erratic (it was a special circumstance); and I don't have time to do that now, as I am already running late for everything.

I hope you don't mind if I post it as it is, since I believe I have covered at least a part of your question.

If you need more, or just want me to straighten up a few points that I may have failed to address properly, please let me know and I'll see to that in a few days.

 

There are many different reasons why the general public around the world has retained or re-discovered an interest towards fascism; but I must confess that for me – and it's one reason I have almost picked up along the way – those echoes of fascism that many seem to hear in the world outside are perhaps less fascinating that some old, slightly outdated, problem of identity. That is, the relation between fascism and national identity in its various naturalistic, spiritualistic, materialistic and – just for the sake of historical completeness – racial formulations.

Now, the existence of a relation, more or less well defined, between fascism and the Italian social, cultural and political formations is almost a given. What is much less clear though, is the nature of such relation: whether it be causal (the Italian system caused fascism), collateral (fascism was an accident on the way), epiphanic (fascism revealed the true characters of the Italian system), etc.

If the need to interpret, understand and explain fascism was present already since the first months of the progressive affirmation of the new political force in the 1920s; the need to understand it in the form of an Italian phenomenon, and especially as an Italian phenomenon, was less ubiquitous and less unchallenged. In part, the understandable desire within the historian community to look at fascism as a broader European phenomenon encouraged an approach that abstracted from its characters deriving from the Italian social and political system – a certainly legitimate approach, which nonetheless is always at risk of going back and applying its super-national template of fascism to national fascisms in a prescriptive rather than descriptive manner – and in part the convenience of separating Italy and Fascism, the people and the dictatorship, to treat Fascism as a parenthesis within Italian history.

That such an approach could not suffice was a central point of the first attempts of a “revision” of the fascist historiography made in the 1960s. Explained Costanzo Casucci, in the introduction to his anthology on the interpretations of fascism [Fascismo e storia in Il Fascismo; antologia di scritti critici 1961 – also cited by De Felice, R. in Il Fascismo; le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici 1970], that

fascism belongs to us, it's ours, a product of our history, like it or not, and therefore has to be taken in; but exactly because it's ours, of our country, it does not transcend it, but is transcended by it. For a sort of metaphysical denial we anti-fascists would almost like for fascists to be fascists and nothing else […] so that the Italians, once become fascists, would have ceased to be Italians. […] And yet that's wrong. It was Italy, it was the Italians that, at a certain point, became fascists without ever ceasing to be Italians, to become then democrats or to return to be democrats: the purpose of historiography is the analysis of such a process in its full entirety, without hiatus, without parenthesis, without picking apart its components, but identifying them and connecting them back to the unity of history.

The issue though, runs a bit deeper than the need for the Italian society as a whole to accept the fascist experience as a part of its national “history-heritage”, and the realization that for the Italian historiographical world Fascism was not only an object of study but also a major component of their formative experience (“the crisis of those generations who had matured during fascism”, as Casucci described it) – at times even of their academical formation. Because, as mentioned before, accepting that a relation exists is not establishing the nature of the relation. I'll keep stealing from De Felice's introductions here but, if – in the words of Angelo Tasca - “to define fascism is to write its history”, then to define such relation is to write a history of the Italian national identity, to see if Fascism was, and to what extent, an expression, an element, an incarnation of the national experience until then, or even a possible formation of an immanent national character.

It's worth remembering that one should always be extremely wary of positing a derivation of social and political formations from some assumed, natural national characters; as well as of the assumption that one political formation could – or should – work to reform and shape a national character. And it is perhaps a curious trait of Fascism, that a political form that so many have superficially explained with the nature of the Italian people, struggled so much in the effort to re-shape the Italians, as if the besieging forces surrounding the Regime weren't those of Bolshevism and Plutocracy but its own national legacy.

There is nonetheless a persistent fascination with the chance of explaining the social and political evolution of Italy by appealing to a “national character” - an ideal form, removed at times entirely from the historical process, resulting both of memories of a far remote past and factors of natural, geographical and environmental influence. An echo of these arguments can be found in Marcello Veneziani's analysis of the “Italian ideology” [La rivoluzione conservatrice in Italia. Genesi e sviluppo dell'ideologia italiana 1987] , where themes of character, natural inclination, heritage appear inextricably tied together:

anti-conservative without being progressive […] it keeps in constant polemics with the present, while awaiting on one side for a better future and on the other calling back to the memory of a nobler past, pairing in such manner a feeling of active decadence with a longing for redemption, historical pessimism and ethical optimism; it engages with the themes of modernity and development but places them within a context of ethical and humane values […] populist albeit not egalitarian […] it's wary of rationalism and contemptuous of liberalism […] it translates artistic and literary myths onto the political field, to the point of conceiving a true experience of aesthetic politics […].

And while the author is describing certain natural traits of the Italian identity – in a depiction that one may find difficult to disagree with entirely – it's rather evident that many of the selected identifiers could work just as well in the context of a definition of Fascism. It's not an uncommon theme (albeit often kept within the subtext) that “Fascist identity” and “Italian identity” were in fact much closer than a certain fraction of post-Resistance historiography has argued. What separates a “naturalistic” approach such as that of Veneziani's from a more critical take on the fascist experience [E. Galli Della Loggia - La morte della Patria 1996] is that the latter argues that the Fascist rule and even more the following Civil War have created such an insoluble tangle of fascist and national identity that one could not get rid of the former without destroying the latter – which is not a “naturalistic” approach but, we may say, an “active historical” one.