Bellassai Sandro - The Masculine Mystique Anti Modernism and Virility in Fascist Italy

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The masculine mystique: antimodernism and virility in fascist ItalySandro Bellassai

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The masculine mystique: antimodernism and virility in

fascist Italy

Sandro Bellassai

Abstract

This article examines the connections between the defense of a traditional concept ofmasculinity and the anti-modernist discourse which characterized the fascist regime.This nexus took shape in the campaign against urbanization and its concomitantexaltation of the peasant world, as well as in the critique of intellectuals and the anti-bourgeois campaign. Through a critique of the modern woman, fascism emphasizedthe hierarchical relationship between the sexes, which found its justification in thesupposed immutability of the subaltern feminine role.

Keywords

Fascism, masculinity, modernization, gender.

The Fascist regime never produced a coherent theory of antimodernism – and

indeed there was no lack of contradiction in fascist views of modernity – but an

antimodernist stance was one of Fascism’s defining features.1 Historiography

has generally relegated fascist antimodernism to a secondary order of inquiry, as

part of studies of cultural and political movements or of established forms of

artistic production in the broadest sense. Most scholarship has concentrated on

artists, intellectuals and journals of the Fascist period that most clearly

articulated either rejection or enthusiastic acceptance of the political, ethical

and cultural values connected to the idea of modernity (Luti 1972; Mangoni

1974; Asor Rosa 1975). Scholars have often treated these debates as clashes

among intellectuals, in which the issues at stake were essentially theoretical or

aesthetic.2 On the whole, the historiography on fascism has dedicated little

attention, and almost none on the part of Italian writers, to questions of gender

in antimodernism; yet the normative representations of masculinity and

femininity were essential ingredients of the rhetorical effectiveness of the

antimodernist message. Reference, at times indirect and oblique but important

nonetheless, to the need to restore a sense of virility surfaced in countless

speeches. Ruralist, pro-natalist, nationalistic and anti-bourgeois rhetoric

depicted a masculine identity that was firmly virile and dominant in the state,

society and family, and launched apocalyptic appeals against the presumed

decay of virility caused by modern, liberal, bourgeois civilization. For these

Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10(3) 2005: 314 – 335

Journal of Modern Italian StudiesISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online ª 2005 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13545710500188338

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diegopellecchia

Highlight

reasons, the term ‘virility’ represents a key feature of the fascist vision of the

world. In short, one can agree with Barbara Spackman’s claim ‘that virility is

not simply one of many fascist qualities, but rather that the cults of youth, of

duty, of sacrifice and heroic virtues, of strength and stamina, of obedience and

authority, and of physical strength and sexual potency that characterize fascism

are all inflections of that master term, virility’ (Spackman 1996: xii; see Falasca

Zamponi 1997: 24 – 5).

Fascist masculinity in a historical perspective

Fascist antimodernism can be organized analytically into a series of precise

terms, in each of which it is possible to identify more or less clear references to

masculine identity and its critical condition in modern civilization. Schema-

tically, the terms are as follows: ruralism, anti-urbanism, anti-intellectualism,

antibourgeoisie, antifeminism – and therefore misogyny – and pronatalism.3

Almost all these cultural stances were rooted in decades-old questions of public

debate; these themes actually surfaced at the end of the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries and developed further in the succeeding decades. They

became interwoven with dramatic wartime events and finally became essential

elements of the national political agenda during Mussolini’s dictatorship. Hence

some elements of fascist masculinity can effectively be interpreted within a

wider chronological perspective than fascism itself, thus highlighting the

persistence and discontinuities of certain elements over time.

Mussolini aimed in various aspects to make a clean break with the past

(Gentile 1993: 100 – 3, 84 – 90, 146; Ben-Ghiat 2004: 183 – 5; Cavazza 2003:

53 – 67). But, for certain questions that were particularly pertinent to

masculinity, fascism presented itself as the culminating moment in a battle

that had begun decades earlier. By explicitly establishing a continuity with the

past, the regime assumed the historic mission to eradicate once and for all those

‘modern’ degenerations that, they argued, had carried the Italian and western

man to the brink of irreversible catastrophe.

One of the most important threads of continuity regards antimodernism: the

fear of the emasculating elements of modernity, which is the pivotal point of

my argument, spread precisely in the last decades of the 1800s, a result of the

processes of modernization sweeping western societies. In the first decades of

the twentieth century, terms such as decadence, degeneration and feminization

were common in the most varied political writing. Feminization was linked

logically to the two other terms because current opinion – above all among

scientists – held that women were biologically inferior to men. Thus a

prevalence of the feminine element in society corresponded necessarily to an

actual regression of the human being on the evolutionary scale. Within the

broader argument about the degeneration of civilization (Pick 1989), a

masculine ‘pessimism’ began to take shape linked to the development of cities,

technological progress, democracy and mass society, and the growing sense of

Fascism and masculinity

315


the weakening of virility, which was to be combatted through exercise and

modern sports activities. These symptoms of the ‘modern neurosis’, as the

celebrated Italian pathologist and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza had already

defined it in 1887 (Mantegazza 1995: 47), appeared as so many signs of a

terrible danger at the gates: the excess of ‘civilization’. This, it was thought,

would distance men ever further from the conditions in which their fathers

lived and would fatally weaken, corrupt or sever the cord that linked

masculinity with tradition. The cure was implicit in the diagnosis. It consisted in

preserving and even energetically reviving traditional – and therefore

patriarchal – values on which public and private lives should be founded.

Salutary immersions in ‘Nature’ and physical activities were required to purify

oneself of the scum of urbanism and sedentary life; the circle of the exclusively

male community should be strengthened to defend it from baleful feminine

influences; and the cult of a full and indisputable virility was to be collectively

reaffirmed.4

Initiatives regarding a virile reintegration of the male ‘character’ and body

were particularly dear to political and cultural currents and movements of more

or less fervent nationalistic and antidemocratic inspiration in Giolitti’s pre-war

Italy, even though they obliquely involved different political cultures. For these

sectors of public opinion above all, militarism and the war taking shape in

Europe in the early 1910s (the war in Libya offered a magnificent occasion for

militaristic and nationalist enthusiasm as early as 1911) represented an explicit

therapy for masculinity. The exaltation of the warrior was also tied to a general

cultural climate in which problems such as the loss of the virile vigor of

‘lineage’, the demographic problem and therefore the quantitative weakening

of the ‘race’, and the exaltation of the thrilling and ‘dangerous life’ as opposed

to the debilitating monotony of the petty bourgeois existence acquired new

political valence. In many respects the prospect of nationalism provided a sort

of ideological container in which the various (and not always coherent) manly,

misogynous and authoritative impulses could converge and sustain one

another.

In the reality of daily experience, the Great War did not produce the effects

desired by those who hoped it would produce a return to the old gender

hierarchy. Thus it seemed necessary in the postwar period to convince the

masses of disillusioned veterans and men in general, frustrated as men by the far

from triumphant economic and social scenario, that the only way out of the

confusion and insecurity was through the revival of the martial values that had

characterized those terrible years. The principle of hierarchy that represented

the very foundation of military life, together with the decisive value of violent

action, were thus transposed onto peacetime civilian life and political dynamics.

The rise in social conflict eroded what moral scruples remained in conservative

circles about embracing violently repressive and liberticidal options. The

widespread perception of the failure of the political liberal system, with which

the notion of democracy had recently been generally identified, offered new

Italian masculinities

316


arguments to the detractors of egalitarianism, parliamentarianism, the

incompetent and mediocre bourgeoisie, intellectualism and sophisticated and

bizarre art. Fascist culture managed to gather and in part represent rhetorically

these pre-existing antidemocratic, antibourgeois and anti-intellectual tenden-

cies, of which Futurism certainly constituted the most celebrated political –

aesthetic synthesis.

The war acted above all as a grand founding myth of the new fascist man:

the war as training ground of virility, as the extreme experience in which a

whole and firm masculine identity was formed or reconstituted. Those who

had experienced it transmitted this sense of a pedagogy of masculinity to the

next generation. The protagonist of a famous novel by Mario Carli recalled

those manly moments during convalescence:

war is something sublime because it forces every man to face the dilemma of

choosing between heroism and cowardice, between the ideal and the

stomach, between the spiritual instinct to project life beyond the material,

and the pure and simple instinct of animal conservation. It is the brutal

discriminator that distinguishes man from man, character from character,

constitution from constitution: on the one side the cowardly, the soft, the

hysterical, the effeminate, the cry-babies, the mommy’s boys; on the other

the strong, the aware, the idealists, the mystics of danger, those who triumph

over fear and those who are courageous by nature, the hot-blooded heroes

and the heroes of the will.5

After the war and as a continuation of the warmongering mission in a time of

peace, the fascist action squads offered men new opportunities.6 The task of

reconstructing an authentically virile identity was thus directed through

violence and action onto the objective of annihilating or forcibly neutralizing

the political and class adversary. Former squad members represented the

intransigent element not just of fascism, but specifically of fascist masculinity.

They experienced a brief season of glory between 1924 and 1925, during the

crisis following the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti and the brief period

during which Roberto Farinacci was party secretary. This is the period in

which Il Selvaggio was born, a journal whose principal mission, above all in its

first years, was the exaltation of violence and a moralizing traditionalism. In the

first number Mino Maccari wrote: ‘It is a question . . . of giving back to all

classes of Italian society a sense of force, virility and willfulness. It is a question

of defending the warrior tradition of our race: to make Italian males, considered

by foreigners as pasta eaters, mandolin players, etc. into men.’7

In a historical perspective, fascism therefore represented an attempt –

contradictory, unrealistic and inconclusive in many respects – to freeze the

crisis of masculine identity that apparently was raging with renewed virulence

in the 1920s, but that had already assumed apocalyptical dimensions for the

men of the belle epoque. Against extreme ills, the fascist ‘revolution’ identified


317


extreme remedies. The primary and declared goal of a violent restoration of the

threatened social and moral order was the reaffirmation of traditional values and

hierarchies. But there was also the idea – whether indirectly or explicitly

articulated – that a regeneration process would restore lost virility to the man

who embraced violent solution. In order to legitimize violence itself and

therefore render ethically accessible this manly experience to a potentially

unlimited number of men, fascism invoked an eternal and transcendental norm,

one that was above history and thus ontologically antimodern, and of divine or

natural origin: ‘The violence that we are cultivating and warming up within us

with the warmth of our blood is the holy, just and decisive violence to which

natural law and moral law have entrusted the function of supreme judge in the

conflict of ideas, races and programs. Violence is the voice of God. Violence is

the justice of nature.’8

Country versus city

Among the various manifestations of fascist antimodernism, ruralism has

probably received the most attention from historians. The rhetorical exaltation

of the rural population as an anthropologically purer nucleus of a compact and

organic national community aimed to make rural families feel fully involved in

the destiny of the nation,9 in addition to placating those social strata on which

the heaviest costs of the economic situation and policies actually fell (Di

Michele 1995: 244 ff; Salvatici 1999; Colarizi 2000: 101). The populist

mythology of the peasant was clearly a product of the mind of one who was not

a peasant: in fact, in some instances, varying paternalistic and patently

antiplebian tones existed tranquilly alongside praises of the ‘rural man’ as the

authentic custodian of spirituality and virtue. Not secondarily, the peasant was

also often presented as the quintessence of ‘natural’ or untamed masculinity in

ruralist discourse. As potrayed by the protagonist of an old novel by Ardegno

Soffici – one of the best poets of such sentiments – the bodies of peasants at

work, ‘with their sobriety, the strength of their bared arms, tanned by the sun,

and their savage resistance to work and fatique, represented . . . a solemn lesson

in virility.’10

The classic motifs of antimodernism converged clearly in ruralist rhetoric.

Taking as the ideal model not so much the workers of the land – farm hands,

for example, certainly did not figure among the favorites of the regime – but

the patriarchal family of sharecroppers or small land owners, fascist ruralism

aimed explicitly at the restoration of a traditional, pre-modern and rigidly

hierarchical moral order. Such a strategy was clearly considered an effective

defense against the degenerations of contemporary civilization, which

included young women’s desires for a better life and a greater ability to

care for themselves, the decline of feudal-type rules and customs that

confirmed ancient patriarchal hierarchies, new forms of amusement and

socializing that favored promiscuity between the sexes and weakened


318


religious sentiment, and certainly the virus of the declining birth rate, which

constantly threatened to spread from the already-infected cities to the ‘most

virile’ rural areas.11

Confidential reports sent by provincial authorities highlighted an increasing

reluctance of younger country people to resign themselves to the harsh living

conditions of preceding generations. Women above all considered the flight

from the countryside an opportunity to escape from rigid patriarchal control. In

1935 the provincial party secretary of Modena wrote: ‘The young people who

marry are anxious to break away from the family and make their own families

because the young wives are intolerant of the discipline of the reggitore [head of

the agricultural family] and want to move to the cities so as to have greater

opportunity to enjoy themselves.’12 In the common imagination, the temple of

modern wellbeing naturally was the city; yet once country people became city

dwellers, they produced fewer children. The result was the attack on the city as

a place of corruption of lineage and the matching exaltation of country purity as

a biological guarantee of the nation. In the preface to Regresso delle nascite,

Richard Korherr’s famous book on the decline of the birth rate, the duce

affirmed that the author’s theory was

of a potent effectiveness. The demonstration that the decline of the birth

rate first attacks the strength of the peoples and then leads them toward

death is incontrovertible. The various phases of the process of disease and

death are also precisely demonstrated, and they bear a name that summarizes

them all: urbanism and metropolitanism, as the author explains . . . . The

metropolis grows, attracting people from the countryside, who, however, as

soon as they are urbanized, become – just like the preexisting population –

infertile. The fields turn to desert; but when the abandoned and burned

regions spread, the metropolis is caught by the throat: neither its businesses

nor its industries nor its oceans of stone and reinforced concrete can

reestablish the balance that by now is irreparably broken: it is a catastrophe.

(Mussolini 1928: 8 – 9)13

The city, technology, comfort and the rhythms of modern life jeopardized

virility because they denied man the benefits of a life in contact with nature,

took his mind off the healthy, eternal struggle against obstacles and material

and moral challenges, prohibited him from tempering his masculinity in an

adventurous existence of continuous dangers and adversities. Themes destined

for wide distribution, the fascination with risk, sacrifice and manly Herculean

labors, together with the myth of the happy life of the peasant, were

undoubtedly fabulous motifs that spoke to individuals frustrated by modern

life. Tormented by anxiety over the artificial and alienating character of daily

existence, middle-class men for decades had been taking refuge in fantasies of

grand and uncontaminated horizons, even from the point of view of gender

identity.14 The prospect of evasion from the daily routine, the city and social


319


and family rules had played a primary role in the construction of the myth of

the warrior long before fascism; George Mosse has written that in the First

World War ‘the sense of having achieved the freedom ‘‘to be a man’’

through the instrumentality of war was widely shared’ (Mosse 1996: 111).

The exaltation of adventure did not necessarily have to lead to risking one’s

life in the trenches or in combat with the enemy, however. Precisely through

literary mythologies presenting courageous and heroic masculine lives, in fascist

Italy even the meek family father in slippers could escape through fantasy from

a reality that by now seemed devoid of invigorating emotions, and thus

rediscover his own ‘authentic’ masculinity. Popular literature of adventures in

wild and mysterious worlds or the solitary existence of strong men in contact

with nature (from colonial novels to the literary myth of the West, from early

science fiction to the police genre, from Tarzan to Captain Ahab) must be

interpreted as escape myths for a male public fascinated with extraordinary

situations precisely because its daily existence seemed all too ordinary. In a 1930

article Filippo Burzio considered popular adventure literature, explicitly

conjecturing a link between the spread of such works and the socio-economic

transformations of the processes of modernization: ‘The more existence

becomes rational . . . and organized, social discipline inflexible, and the task

assigned to the individual precise and predictable . . ., the more the margin of

adventure shrinks, like each person’s wilderness between the suffocating walls

of private property.’15 Here too the myth of adventure, like the return to

nature, did not belong to an undifferentiated subject, but referred to the

imaginary, urbanized middle class man, for whom it offered a fantastic

compensation for an existential condition perceived as harmful for his gender

identity.

Anti-virile men: the intellectual

In Mussolini’s new Italy, however, the common man was not called to make

his daily life heroic (not to mention adventurous or dangerous) merely in

fantasy: proud in his uniform, the Italian man of fascism was involved in

paramilitary discipline since youth, encouraged to build his muscles through

morning athletic exercises, and immersed in a spoken and body language that

was military, uncouth and virile (cf. Gentile 1993:180 ff; Dau Novelli 1994:

222 ff). All of this apparently corresponded to a natural vocation of the male

gender: the duce himself affirmed that ‘war is to man as maternity is to woman’

(Mussolini 1958: 259). In its totalitarian project, the fascist regime pursued a

pedagogy of virility potentially aimed at every male of every age, proposing

once again the ideal masculine model of the combatant devoted to action; in

this way it aimed to fight the negative product of modernity: the reflexive,

hypersensitive and frail man whose passive and uncertain character derived

from an excess of rationality. As a 1928 article in Il Popolo d’Italia stated, ‘we

need soldiers rather than philosophers’.16


320


The intellectual (that is to say the ‘enlightened’ intellectual) was attacked by

the regime for being the standard bearer of rational culture, the symbol of

progress and the protagonist of the modern city (Zunino 1985: 284 – 5); in a

historical sense, he was the son of the bourgeoisie. However, he was a male son;

thus it was a question of a masculine personage, denigrated for damaging the

traditional family at its roots with his lack of virilility and absence of patriarchal

dignity. A 1939 article in the journal Gerarchia ridiculed the ‘pseudo-

intellectual, facetious and Malthusian, suffering from corrosive criticism and

affective insufficiency, who, from the compromises of scanty reason and the

contradictions of a weak will, fatally abdicates the dignity of the pater familias’.17

On other occasions, as in the declarations of anti-intellectualism of Maccari’s

‘savages’, the intellectual was derided as a symbol of a type of degeneration of

the intellect. Even in this case, the invective against the emasculation of the

intellect tended consciously to design a negative identity profile that was

specifically male:

What is intellectualism? It is important to avoid misunderstandings in this

regard. Intellectualism is a sort of infertile intelligence, an intelligence without

virility. Intellectualism is a disease of the intelligence . . . . Intellectualism is a

pathological International, like the hymn of the sexually inverted or the

anarchists who are that way because nature was cruel to them . . . . Their

function is in fact feminine, but in the worst sense, for it is a femininity that

will never be maternal.18

Intellectualism, therefore, was a sort of ‘disease of the intelligence’: as

intelligence traditionally was seen as an unmistakably male attribute,

intellectualism was a pathology of masculinity. It was precisely an ‘intelligence

without virility’. In many respects, such a pathology seemed to have the

characteristics of a degenerative syndrome or a senile disease: it belonged to the

historical twilight of civilization and therefore recalled the concept of original

masculine purity that modernity corrupts and consumes. Against the senile

intellectualism – degeneration of man, fascist rhetoric exalted action, impulsiv-

ity and youth.

In a certain sense, the insistence on the concept of youth can be understood

in light of a need to condense the dynamic move toward the future in an

ancient word that would recall the idea of the endless cycle of life in history and

nature, and connect immediately to the perpetual motion of the generations,

while simultaneously evoking stability, safety and family genealogy.19 This

term therefore allowed for a seemingly impossible rhetorical equilibrium

between the positive exaltation of the ‘new’ and the condemnation of the

degenerative effects of modern civilization; in fact, this term referred both to

the moral characteristics of the individual as well as to the identifying traits

connected to a larger historical and cultural background. A good example can

be seen in the exaltation of the masculinity of the ‘ras’ by the ‘savages’ in 1925:


321


‘The ras is a young, new man. And by youth we mean audacity, candor and

freedom of thought, speech and action; the love of danger, the force of will, the

inclination toward violence, indifference and the exaltation of spirit and

faith.’20 It does not take much to realize that youth here represents a metaphor

having little to do with any real, factual, biographical quality of man. On other

occasions, the term was used in a more classical, generational sense. The fascist

idea of youth merged enthusiasm and maturity, millenary history and the

future, tradition and revolution, as seen in Mario Carli’s novel L’italiano di

Mussolini (1930):

This thirty-year old man had already lived a full existence of profound

experiences, adventures of the spirit and dramas of the flesh, had gambled

with death without ever losing, had enriched his blood with steel shrapnel

and gun powder, this boy who suddenly, in the first moment of youth,

found in himself the virtues of command and obedience, the capacity to

govern men, lead them to victory and to death, administer substances,

organize sectors of life, encampments, defenses, and collective states of

mind, who then came to know the street, the ambush, the ways and places

of civil war, and the great masters of cunning, through which he learned to

save himself from the political ambushes his adversaries and rivals set for

him; this young man with clear, willful, and sincere eyes, fit to command

and turn fantasy into reality, appeared to him as a completely new human

figure, a fresh model of Italian virility; in order to recognize it, his

imagination had to make great leaps backwards in history.21

The aim of these ‘great leaps backwards’ was also and above all to bypass the era

of the bourgeoisie, to move the hand of time back to the happy age when the

hated bourgeois, this firstborn son of modernity, had not yet been born.

Anti-virile men: the bourgeois

In the ambiguous anticapitalism of fascism, the term ‘bourgeois’ was often

considered to refer fundamentally to the high bourgeoisie, described as the

parasitic and immoral class par excellence. As has been emphasized, the ‘anti-

plutocratic orthodoxy of the regime’ suggested searching for the causes of the

crisis of civilization principally in a concept of capitalism that faded

imperceptibly into industrialism, to the point of frequently being identified

with it (Marino 1983: 114). Some even exalted poverty as a completely positive

condition for the increase in population: well being was viewed as favoring the

diffusion of nervous disorders, therefore running the risk of corrupting the

‘race’ and slowing population growth (Wanrooij 1990: 109). However,

resentment toward the bourgeois, an enemy that fascism in theory should have

fought relentlessly, almost always faded into a much more vague resentment

toward the bourgeois ‘spirit’ (Wanrooij 1986: 49). The confusion in this case


322


does not seem to be accidental: the choice to foreground the bourgeois ‘state of

mind’ (a decidedly volatile concept) indicated that the true objective was to

provoke an emotive effect in the audience, rather than to obtain a concrete

result in line with the message’s literal contents. In the 1938 speech in which he

announced the ‘three blows to the bourgeoisie’, the duce himself emphasized

the importance of making ‘a very clear distinction between capitalism and

bourgeoisie. Because the bourgeoisie can be an economic category, but it is

above all a moral category, a state of mind, a temperament . . . . The

bourgeoisie is a category of political –moral nature’ (Mussolini 1959: 189; see

Ben-Ghiat 2004: 77 – 86; Milza 2000: 775 – 91).

Fascist anti-bourgeois sentiment can be distinguished in two different – and

potentially diverging – attitudes: on the one hand the exaltation of the values of

the countryside, which translated into a ruralistic rhetoric linked to anti-

urbanism; on the other the contempt for bourgeois conventions and comforts,

in favor of action, movement and unshakable will. The first attitude glorified

stability and tradition; the second, dynamism and adventure. At first glance,

only the former should be classified fully as antimodernism; but if we consider

the two strategies from the point of view of gender, they appear much less

distinct. In both cases, ‘bourgeois’ meant the well-off urbanized man, satisfied

and increasingly desirous of the domestic comforts of modern civilization. Both

positions opposed this enemy in the name of the uncouth male, ready and

willing to sacrifice, endowed with brisk manners, clear and solid ideas, and

volatile, disdainful language. Both also extolled the vigorous male body,

polemically opposed to that of the unfit and cowardly bourgeois. This

exaltation did not lack a homoerotic component of almost sensual satisfaction

in and fascination with the male body as an aesthetic value in itself. Not by

chance, the fraternal community of men was another constant motif in the

representation of a virile, comradely and unselfish sociality, which was opposed

to the hypocritical, egotistical and opportunistic character of relations among

bourgeois men. This representation was clearly laden with an exasperated

misogyny: real men do not need women; rather they disdainfully distance

themselves from them. Contact with the female world was seen as threatening

to diminish virility, the ‘natural’ dimension of which was specifically that

warrior-like, comradely bond among men, the highest possible level of human

relations. Furthermore, the two denigrators of the degenerate bourgeois (the

rural – traditional man and the dynamic – defiant man) were in their ideal

environment only when immersed in the vast expanses of nature or in

adventurous undertakings; closed within cement walls in a sedentary life, both

immediately suffered from the symptoms of masculine decadence.

Because they were so inclined to vast, existential horizons, both anti-

bourgeois tendencies privileged the spiritual dimension of life. The bourgeois

was described as completely unworthy of any noble longing of the spirit and

devoted exclusively to the most narrow-minded and petty materialism.

Satisfied with material well being, he was by definition impervious to the


323


spiritual values that make the nation glorious: in particular, he disdained the

political duty of fertility because of his petty, craven nature and was absolutely

incapable of any genuine pride of race. On the rhetorical level of the struggle

against the ‘Malthusians’ (a term that probably evoked for most people obscure

threats from far-away planets; we can define it as an example of subliminal

antimodernism), there was an almost natural convergence of interests with

certain Catholic circles, in particular in the final years of the regime. Giuseppe

De Luca, the priest who founded the journal Frontespizio, declared that ‘the

bourgeoisie, of its own nature, is like a procuress. De Luca stated that

‘Christianity is essentially anti-bourgeois . . . . A Christian, a true Christian and

thus a Catholic, is the opposite of a bourgeois.’22

In an Italy still firmly traditional in its socio-economic and cultural

structures, excessively modernist and futurist movements were combated

through the large-scale promotion of the idea of a genuine and simple,

religiously domestic virility that was opposed to the degenerate, mediocre,

opportunistic and cynical masculinity of the bourgeois and the urban Jew. This

complex stance was conveyed through multiple communicative channels.

Studies of the popular literature of the interwar period, for example, have

revealed a decisive prevalence of the rural – patriarchal element over the

dynamic – technological element. Even when the second theme was

ambiguously present in the story, it was corrected and diluted, so to speak,

by a climate of ‘ancient mysticism’. The character of the aviator, for example,

was traced back to the much more traditional image of the knight; the almost

religious aura surrounding him redeemed his soul from a too close association

with metallic materials. ‘In all cases,’ Gazzola Stacchini concludes, ‘the

Promethean archetype of the rebel superman collapses into the figure of the

‘‘responsible’’, lawful man’ (Gazzola Stacchini 1991: 474, 470 – 73; see de

Grazia 1992: 43; Falasca Zamponi 1997: 104 – 5, 120). The ideal was a virile

discipline of body and mind, as expressed on the pages of Il Selvaggio: ‘Let us

teach our boys that to really be strong men, it is necessary to be a virgin at age

20 and avoid any nicotine intoxication. That it is not a shame to be a virgin

when one marries and remain faithful to one woman for his entire life. Let us

remember that Mussolini does not smoke and drinks water in order to work

intensely.’23

The linking of sexual purity and the duce (as a rule, the media archetype

of virile strength) should not surprise: messages like these were not overly

concerned with logical coherence. Precisely by remaining more connected

to an evocative rather than a realistic and linear dimension, the

antibourgeois discourse could contain frequently contradictory languages

and opinions, thus offering the important advantage of confines that could

shift according to the rhetorical expediency of the moment. On the whole,

however, such statements designed an ideal whose masculine nature was

always clear and unmistakable. In countless instances regarding the

bourgeois, even when referring generically to a ‘state of mind’, the


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reference was not to a gender neutral figure: who if not a male can be

accused of being ‘an enemy of sport . . . pacifist, pitiful, sanctimonious,

ready to be moved emotionally, always humanitarian, infertile’? Who if not

a husband ‘on Saturday evening talks with his wife about whether they

should conceive a child or not’, calculating if it is worth it economically

(Mussolini 1959: 188)? Equally evident is the masculine nature of a certain

‘tendency toward skepticism, compromise, the comfortable life, careerism,’

which had already been execrated by the duce in 1934, who concisely

concluded: ‘the creed of the fascist is heroism, that of the bourgeois egoism’

(Mussolini 1958: 192).

The mediocrity of the bourgeois in such representations was, in short,

specifically a masculine mediocrity. The greatness, nobility of mind and

ideal vigor lacking in the bourgeois were typically virile, and therefore

fascist, qualities. The bourgeois, in other words, was recognizable above all

for a veritable deficit of masculinity, which was the essence of his

mediocrity. If, as I have pointed out, the ringing antibourgeois denuncia-

tions were almost always accompanied by statements that greatly blurred any

social references, the rhetorical concreteness of virility was nevertheless not

lost. Processo alla borghesia, a work published in 1939, proposed nothing less

than a trial of the bourgeoisie and ventured to make a subtle distinction

between the average man and the bourgeois. Because of his unmanly

nature, the bourgeois sought to flee from his own impotence through petty,

effeminate, or infantile means:

Middle class, middle man, incapable of great virtue or great vice: and there

would be nothing wrong with that if only he would be willing to remain as

such; but when his childlike or feminine tendency to camouflage pushes

him to dream of grandeur, honors, and thus riches, which he cannot achieve

honestly with his own ‘second-rate’ powers, then the average man

compensates with cunning, schemes, and mischief; he kicks out ethics and

becomes a bourgeois. The bourgeois is the average man who does not

accept to remain such and who, lacking the strength sufficient for the

conquest of essential values – those of the spirit – opts for material ones, for

appearances. (Pavese 1939: 56)

To become bourgeois was still a fault pertaining to the masculine mystique: not

by chance, shortly after, the bourgeois was scornfully defined as someone who

was ‘spiritually castrated’ (Pavese 1939: 59).

The modern woman and the demographic problem

The definition by men of an orthodoxy of femininity cannot be considered a

simple reflex of conservative and traditionalist male behavior towards women:


325


more profoundly, it is the necessary presupposition for the exaltation of an

orthodoxy of masculinity. Traditional masculinity and femininity are

constructed socially on the basis of a relationship characterized by reciprocity

and interdependence. Because of the identifying function of men’s supremacy

over women – which is an essential condition of traditional masculinity – the

male image of women assumes a central role in the analysis of masculinity. In

other words, the discursive construction of the woman is a constituent moment

and not a simple effect of the construction of a virile, self-confident and strong

image of man.

When such a normative image assumed violent traits, as happened with

fascist masculinity, the supposed inferiority of women became doubly

necessary, so to speak. The contradiction of a virile ideal so absolute as to

become practically unfeasible for most flesh and blood men was thus bypassed –

in virilistic logic – through the masculine ideal of a model of femininity marked

by inferiority, obedience and absolute dedication to the family. As Chiara

Saraceno has written,

The pompousness, together with the uncouthness imposed on the fascist

male, complete with uniforms, parades, goose step, and circus acrobatics,

displayed a sort of pantomime of sexual (as well as racial) superiority, in

which the protagonist, the pathetic little petit-bourgeois office worker,

perhaps a bit chubby, seemed out of place. To lend some verisimilitude to

this virile image, a stooge was necessary: not a woman who was equally

pompous and uncouth, even less a woman in a position of responsibility,

but a modest and submissive wife, who at least by her behavior in public

and social role would confirm that fragile superiority. (Saraceno 1995:

482)

The image of women, in order to fully confirm male superiority, not only had

to be subordinate, but also express the immutable nature of that subordination

throughout history. In short, the woman had to confirm that she was the

inferior companion of man in the past, present and always. The traditional

representation of femininity thus constituted a sure foundation on which to

construct the antimodernist discourse: the woman was the living proof of the

persistent nature of the human condition. In this context one can understand

the importance of the glorification of reproduction for the virilistic discourse.

Reproduction, in fact, was presented as a triumph or revenge of Nature over

history and consequently over modernity, which was considered a degenerate

product of history. Similarly, it is possible to understand the crucial importance

of the association of women with Nature and tradition. As a result, the concept

of a ‘modern’ woman literally became a contradiction in terms. As women

were considered, par excellence, the ‘natural’ part of humanity and as nature and

modernity are opposing and irreconcilable concepts, if a woman was modern,

she was no longer a woman and thus could not be considered to belong to the


326


female gender. The true woman, as a fascist era song suggests, is always the

same:

Now I will show you

The most beautiful women of ages past,

The grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and ancestors of old

Who were loved through the ages.

See, only the clothes have changed,

Their heads are still the same,

The same troubles make them suffer,

The same whims make them glad.

Is woman a blessing or a curse?

Nobody knows!

But she remains the same

In every age.24

Even though they proclaimed the immutability of women, men knew

perfectly well that women, influenced by modernity, were not merely

changing their clothes. Men thus faced the not insignificant problem of a

profound and epochal transformation of the female identity and the

catastrophic notes that had been sounding for decades prefigured irreparable

disasters. A representation of the ‘new woman’ in pathological terms was

advanced in order to trace a line between orthodoxy and deviance, but the

description of a monstrous figure devoid of femininity, rather than presenting a

solution to the problem, often achieved the effect of amplifying the very sense

of alarm that the problem itself provoked.

The discomfort that the woman –modernity combination provoked in man

assumed countless forms and can be verified in a multitude of contemporary

sources. Desperate appeals were launched against the invasion of indecorous,

foreign fashions, against modern dances and new models of slim, confident

women determined to attain wider access to work outside the home and free

time. A complex system of state structures, public provisions, celebrations and

various initiatives sustained the exclusive ‘motherly mission’ of every woman.

At the beginning of the 1930s a rigid control of the press aimed at eliminating

any reference to the ‘donna crisi’, the type of woman who was the product of

the crisis of gender identities that had been imported from abroad. Countless

novels, moralizing works and articles in all sorts of publication aimed to exalt

the woman as wife and mother and extinguish any spark of the terrible

modernist conflagration. The stakes were nothing less than the state of the

cosmic order: ‘All the moral, financial and economic disorder of a civilization

depends upon the corruption of the woman’, Paolo Ardali thundered in

1929.25

In his booklet La Donna ‘Tipo tre’, Umberto Notari, a journalist and writer

well-known in the first half of the century, dealt specifically with ‘a


327


phenomenon that is most visible in all so-called civilized countries’, that of the

‘male decadence and the rise of the woman’ as an effect of the ‘mechanical and

industrial civilization’ (Notari 1998: 13 – 14).26 After the good woman of the

home and the sensual femme fatale, this was precisely a new type of woman who

openly challenged man: she worked all day in an office, nimbly jumped from the

bus to the ‘electric traction’ tram, did not show the necessary respect to her

husband and, because of her various commitments, did not give birth to more

than a pair of children on average. The serious problem of the declining birth

rate – the book was published in 1929 – was mentioned on many pages: the

‘type three’ woman was reluctant about maternity, the responsibility of which

fell to the male.27 In fact, Notari openly accused men of having created this

situation, abdicating their role of command and ceding, over the preceding fifty

years, more and more terrain to women. At this point, he warned dramatically,

man must decide. If he wants the woman to be fertile, in the Biblical sense

and according to the commands of the Race and the Nation, he alone must

assume, by himself, all the responsibilities of their common sustenance. If

instead he wants the woman to share the burden of work, the risks of his

business, and she is to gain from such sharing, then he must allow the

woman to turn into an element of sterility. (Notari 1998: 92 – 3)

The pro-birth rhetoric of the regime, of which Notari’s book is part, can be

considered a discursive terrain bordering on misogyny, virilism and

antimodernism (Falasca Zamponi 1997: 155 – 62). The anti-bourgeois senti-

ment also played a primary role: while the bourgeoisie lovingly raised not their

children but their lap poodles (as the fascist press reported),28 showing once

again a morbid inclination toward extravagance and a wretched indifference

toward the nation’s destiny, the regime placed its hopes in the men and women

who were not yet corrupted by modern civilization.

Starting with the Discorso dell’Ascensione (Speech on the Ascension), which

Mussolini delivered on 26 May 1927, the demographic question became of

utmost national importance. At stake was the international weight of Italy,

which would never be significant and certainly never equal the imperial

tradition of ancient Rome, if the number of Italians did not increase rapidly.

The link between sexual reproduction and the State thus became one of the

principal canals through which the question of virility and more generally of

traditional gender identities, acquired an extraordinary political and institutional

importance in fascist discourse. Accordingly, the State had new and important

reasons to heighten its own role as judge of the private behavior of men and

women. If the declining birth rate was caused primarily by the negative effects

of modernity, then relentlessly combating these effects became an even more

important task of the regime.

Given the misogynistic, homophobic and virilistic nature of fascist rhetoric,

it is not surprising that the demographic campaign, pioneered in Italy at the end


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of 1920s, was sustained by a series of normative representations that made direct

reference to a gender code of orthodoxy or deviance. The deviant male was

above all a bourgeois, egoistic and unpatriotic as well as scarcely virile (because

he was unfit or reluctant to repeatedly impregnate the female); the deviant

female was the too ‘modern’ woman, Americanized, independent and

masculinized. The social damages provoked by these two converging deviances

were most serious: a widespread and ‘excessive loosening of family hierarchical

relations, a decline in the man of that robust virility that fascism, with much

love and perseverance, pursues in other ways’.29 As Saraceno has pointed out,

well beyond the goal of demographic increase, the pro-natal campaign

immediately touched on the question of the re-equilibrium of power within

the family (Saraceno 1995: 475 – 6). The cornerstone of this neo-patriarchal

strategy was the denigration of woman’s work, essentially considered an

unnatural phenomenon in that it was contrary to women’s physiology. Like

sports (Teja 2004) and intellectual activities (some writers also included culture,

or even simple education on the list), women’s work was held to be harmful at

various levels: biologically because it damaged the reproductive organs; morally

because it instilled the seeds of pride and autonomy in the female mind; socially

because it cooled the woman’s enthusiasm for her sacrificial mission as wife and

fertile mother, therefore weakening the traditional family. Perfectly aware of

the relational nature of gender identity, fascist rhetoric denounced the terrible

consequences of this feminine ‘degeneration’ for male identity: facing such a

situation, men would become demoralized and in not obtaining the proper

recognition of their authority in the family and society, they would feel

humiliated in their masculinity (and therefore in their reproductive ‘power’,

due to the above-mentioned logical connection between the two concepts).

Mussolini himself explained this clearly:

Women’s work . . . is related not just with unemployment but also with the

demographic question. Work, when it is not a direct impediment, distracts

from procreation, foments independence and consequent physical and moral

modes that are contrary to childbirth. Man, disoriented and above all

‘unemployed’ in all senses, ends up renouncing the family . . . . The exodus

of women from the work force would undoubtedly have economic

repercussions for many families, but a legion of men would lift up their

humiliated brow and the number of families immediately entering into the

life of the nation would increase a hundredfold. It is necessary to understand

that the same work that causes the loss of procreational attributes in the

woman, in the man creates a strong physical and moral virility.30

Mario Palazzi, among others, declared that the ‘exaggerated (especially when

taking into consideration the corresponding male unemployment) use of

women’s services in every field’ would feed the ‘female intrusiveness in every

branch of activity’, and thus produce a ‘progressive relaxation of family ties and


329


of male authority within the bosom of the family, finally leading to matriarchy.

And matriarchy is not virile and even less fascist.’31

The measures the regime took between 1927 and 1938 to exclude women

from some occupations and above all to reduce the female presence in the

overall panorama of paid work, did not produce the hoped-for effects (due

above all to the difficult economic conditions of families, worsened by the

Second World War). More than an actual exclusion of women from work

outside the home, however, the fundamental goal of such measures was to curb

the increasing importance of women in teaching, professional and office work,

and the service industry; much less threatening and much more difficult to

oppose was the presence of women in certain traditional manufacturing sectors

(textile, food, etc.) and above all in the countryside. In reality the regime did

not seem too worried that female factory workers, or – something more

improbable – country women were dressing in the latest fashions, sporting

‘masculine’ hair cuts, in short, aspiring to transgressive models of identity. In

fact, the rural housewife was considered to be the very symbol of tradition,

fertility and feminine subordination. Next to her and crowned by a brood of

children the indisputable king of the family towered, delighted and blessedly

ignorant of any challenge to his virility.

Conclusion

The widespread anti-modernist rhetoric in fascist Italy was abundantly fueled

by gender language, which was an integral part of the rhetorical effectiveness of

the message. Through the language of masculinity, the male audience was

furnished with guarantees, certainties and reassurances as to the integrity of his

identity and above all as to his virility uncorrupted by modern civilization.

Given that men had been obsessed for decades with the fragility of their virility,

these representations found a particularly receptive audience, sounded

convincing and easily acquired credibility in the male population.

The connection between gender and antimodernism shows the very

importance of the concept of gender in catalyzing a wide consensus among

heterogeneous social spheres. Thanks to its receptivity in a vast number of men,

to whom the virilistic discourse said exactly what they wanted to hear, the code

of masculinity permitted at various historical junctures the successful

transmission of political contents of a different nature. The anti-modernist

rhetoric exploited this capacity fully. At the same time, the collective need to

re-formulate a stable and virile male identity, widespread since the late 1800s,

allowed many men to exploit the essentially metaphoric discursive terrain of

antimodernism, legitimizing their strategies of patriarchal restoration with a

nostalgic exaltation of tradition.

Fascism’s ruralistic, pro-natal and anti-bourgeois campaigns proved to be

unrealistic and ineffectual, or produced results well below expectations.

Nevertheless, the accompanying rhetorical production and the base ideals are


330


crucial for a cultural history of antimodernism in twentieth century Italy. And a

study focusing on masculinity in antimodernism of the interwar period (these

pages represent a partial and provisional step in that direction), can throw

significant light not only on fascist rhetoric, but also on the attempts by

Mussolini’s regime to resolve one of the great epochal questions confronting

recent political cultures: how to guarantee the continuity of traditional social

and gender hierarchies when faced with broad and deep historical change.

How could vast segments of the population be integrated into the new mass

society in a way that did not radically challenge those hierarchies?

In this context the language of masculinity played an extremely important

role. Without ignoring the gender characteristics of the audience (until a few

decades ago, one could argue that public opinion as a whole was substantially a

big men’s club), the guarantees to maintain male privilege and the linguistic

therapies for men’s insecurities about their virility have played a major role in

the social integration strategies of recent history. The importance of the role of

masculinity was well understood by the theorists of such strategies, by those

involved in building consensus and by all members of the political elite, from

the most seasoned to the most uncouth. For this reason, questions related to

masculinity deserve to be taken into consideration not only in the context of

gender studies, but also – and more fully – in the context of the historiography

of modern Italian society.

Notes

1 The term antimodernism here conveys a complex combination of behaviors,representations and languages that express a more or less pronounced suspicion oreven open hostility towards the social and cultural phenomena connected to theprocesses of modernization.

2 In this sense the antimodernists par excellence were undoubtedly the men associatedwith the journal Il Selvaggio and the Strapaese movement; their identity as writersand artists, and their more or less hostile relations with other literary and philosophiccircles have made fascist antimodernism a privileged object of research for literaryand cultural history (Ben-Ghiat 2004, Adamson 1995). The most attentivehistorians, however, have highlighted the verifiable superimpositions and contra-dictions in the various positions, considering the modernism – antimodernismpolarity as a pair of relatively abstract extremes, or even as ‘generic labels’ not to betaken too literally: see Cannistraro (1975: 58). An important analysis on therelationship between antimodernism and fascist masculinity is provided by Wanrooij(1997: 379 – 439).

3 For reasons of space I will not discuss here other important questions such ashomophobia and the persecution of homosexuality. A more general (thoughconcise) examination of masculinity during the fascist period is found in Bellassai(2004: 76 – 98). See also Passerini (1991: 99 – 109).

4 For example, the young Italian men who at the turn of the century practicedmountaineering and organized group excursions that pre-emptorily excludedwomen were seeking relief from the distressing sensation of being ‘no longer not somuch men as robots laboriously pressed by the thousands of tentacles of marvelous


331


machines’. Paolo Monelli, ‘Tendopoli’, Rivista mensile del Club Alpino Italiano, 10(1914), cited in Papa (2004: 36).

5 Mario Carli, L’italiano di Mussolini (1930) in Gazzola Stacchini (1991: 494 – 5). Italicsin the original. On Carli, see Passerini (1991: 110 ff).

6 For a contextualization of the fascist action squads within the postwar masculinecrisis, see Wanrooij (1990: 210 ff).

7 Mino Maccari, ‘Squadrismo’, Il Selvaggio 1(1), 13 July 1924: 1.8 Mino Maccari, ‘Parla il Selvaggio – 4’, Il Selvaggio, 1(12), 28 September 1924: 2.9 Zunino (1985: 309). For a fuller discussion of ruralism, see Isnenghi (1991).10 Soffici (1921: 22). On ruralist rhetoric, beginning with the ‘Battle of grain’ launched

in 1925, see Falasca Zamponi (1997: 149 – 55).11 An important scholar of Mussolini’s language has sustained that ‘three registers of the

Strapaese motif are present in Mussolini’s speeches: there is the personal boast thathe, too, is a son of the land, there is the allusion – through the praise of countrypeople – of the differing behavior of city dwellers and factory workers; and there isthe declaration that the level of authenticity of the Italian race is in direct relation tothe rate of ruralism and fertility.’ Simonini (2003: 116).

12 Report of the federal secretary of Modena, 29 March 1935, cited in Colarizi (2000:103).

13 On the apocalyptic representation of the city in fascist rhetoric see also Horn (1994,ch. 5), ‘The Sterile City’ (for the relationship between urbanism and degenerationwith particular regard to gender, see pp. 96 – 9).

14 Regarding the USA, see Rotundo (1993: 258 – 9; 184 – 5 and 357, note 36).15 Cited in Gramsci (1975: 2128). Burzio’s article on popular literature and in

particular the Three Musketeers, was published in La Stampa on 22 October 1930 andreprinted in Italia letteraria 2(45), 9 November 1930: 706.

16 G. Gamberini, ‘Sistematizzare la fede’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 4 April 1928, cited in LaRovere (2002: 61).

17 Ellevı, ‘Istituto familiare e femminismo’, Gerarchia, 19(5), May 1939: 332.18 Il Selvaggio no. 1, ‘Gazzettino’, Il Selvaggio, 10(8), 30 November 1933: 58. Emphasis

mine. See Marino (1983: 109 – 10).19 On the use of symbolism connected to youth in art between the two wars, see

Malvano (1994). More broadly, on the importance of youthful rhetoric in fascistculture, see Passerini (1994) and Ben-Ghiat (2004: 125 – 63). On the connectionbetween youth and the therapy of virility in the ‘1914 generation’, see Mosse (1990),in particular ch. 4, ‘The young and the experience of the war.’

20 Sugo-di-bosco, ‘Il segreto per cuocere i ceci ovvero vogliamo settanta ras’, IlSelvaggio, II(19), 25 May 1925: 1.

21 Mario Carli, L’italiano di Mussolini (1930), in Gazzola Stacchini (1991: 493).22 Giuseppe De Luca, ‘Il cristiano come un antiborghese’, Frontespizio, February 1939,

cited in Marino (1983: 153). See also Dau Novelli (1994: 25 – 52).23 Romano Romanelli, ‘Considerazioni sul nostro Popolo’, Il Selvaggio 4(13 – 14), 30

July 1929: 3.24 Bel Amı-Bellei, Le donne di tutte le eta, n.p., cited in Cavallo and Iaccio (1988: 337 –

8).25 Paolo Ardali, La politica demografica di Mussolini, Casa Ed. ‘‘Mussolinia’’, Mantua,

1929, cited in Meldini (1975: 162). According to David Horn, ‘the virility of thesocial body, like that of the individual male, was seen to depend crucially on women’(Horn 1994: 65).

26 The opposition to industrial civilization was not, however, exclusive to men: seeLombroso (1930: 241 – 3, 247 – 8).

27 ‘Of course the ‘‘type three’’ woman bears a significant responsibility in therecognized and universal decline of the birth rate. And how to blame her? Who


332


called the woman to her present-day economic dynamism? Man. Who induced andpersuades her to train and prepare herself on a terrain that is certainly not the mostappropriate – according to Nature and tradition – for the delicacy of her organismand sensitivity? Man . . . . And so how to pretend that the woman work, earn,provide for herself, love, marry and also bear children? Not to fear. Man does nothave any such pretence; on the contrary, he adapts fairly willingly to the sterility orsemi-sterility desired by his companion, the more so in that the yields of her financialcollaboration can continue longer. This is perhaps the epicenter of the granddemographic drama that is tormenting the white race’ (Notari 1998: 63).

28 ‘Still speaking of examples, certainly one of the most nauseating phenomenaregarding the declining birth rate is that of the well-off classes – the high and fatbourgeoisie – who, as an article in Popolo d’Italia notes, ‘‘they show us their buildingsand luxurious apartments, empty of children and populated with dogs and bitches’’.’‘Stato fascista e famiglia fascista’, Critica fascista, 15(8), 15 February 1937: 113(unsigned editorial). The article referred to in the Popolo d’Italia appeared on 30January 1937. On the anti-bourgeois tones of the pro-birth rhetoric, see Wanrooij(1986: 48).

29 Manlio Pompei, ‘La Famiglia e il Fascismo: un’inchiesta da fare’, Critica fascista, 9(9),1 May 1933: 164.

30 Benito Mussolini, ‘Macchina e donna’, Il Popolo d’Italia, 31 August 1934, cited inMacciocchi (1976: 145).

31 Mario Palazzi, ‘Autorita dell’uomo’, Critica fascista, 9(10), 15 May 1933: 183.

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