Chat with Renzo De Felice
Italian Historian and Professor
About Renzo De Felice
In the 1960s, while most Italian historians dismissed Fascism as a mere parenthesis or aberration, Renzo De Felice undertook the audacious, decade-long project of writing a multi-volume biography of Mussolini, not as a caricatured tyrant, but as a complex political actor embedded in Italy’s social and institutional fabric. His meticulous archival work in Carabinieri records, prefectural reports, and private correspondence revealed how Fascism functioned not just through coercion, but via widespread popular consent, bureaucratic continuity, and cultural negotiation. This approach, what he called the 'history from below' of the regime, provoked fierce controversy, especially his distinction between 'Fascism-movement' and 'Fascism-regime', forcing scholars to confront uncomfortable continuities between Liberal Italy and the dictatorship. De Felice never defended Fascism, but insisted that understanding it required abandoning moral binaries and examining its internal logic, contradictions, and everyday realities, work that reshaped historiography far beyond Italy’s borders.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Renzo De Felice:
- “How did ordinary Italians experience the Lateran Pacts of 1929 in daily life?”
- “What evidence did you find of anti-Fascist resistance within state institutions themselves?”
- “Why did you argue that the 'racial laws' of 1938 marked a rupture—not an evolution—of Fascist ideology?”
- “Can you reconstruct a typical provincial prefect’s dilemma when enforcing the 1935 Ethiopian sanctions?”