Everyday Mussolinism: Friends, Family, Locality and Violence in Fascist Italy

The article uses a range of archival material to commence an investigation into how and with what assumptions Italians lived under a Mussolinian dictatorship which called itself totalitarian. It suggests that ‘revolutionary’ Fascism – what Emilio Gentile and others have seen as a new ‘political religion’ – met with some scepticism in the daily behaviour of many Italians. The family, the locality, the most helpful functioning of patron–client networks, the search for special advantage for oneself and ‘friends’ conditioned Fascist militancy and framed ‘ordinary life’, all the more because the practice of the dictatorship was itself so shot through with contradictions.