Response to Matteo Millan: Mapping Squadrist Violence

Abstract

Matteo Millan's article is part of an important wave of scholarship that investigates the central role that violence played in Fascist governance throughout the long two decades of Benito Mussolini's rule. 1 Whether at the level of street beatings, worker exploitation (including the use of forced labour) or abuses and mass death in a large network of Fascist concentration camps and confinement spaces (prisons, mental hospitals, penal colonies) that extended to Africa and the Balkans, it is only in the last decade that Italian Fascist violence has been taken seriously. I use this phrase with intent, to highlight the enduring impact of older historiographies that fostered a grave underestimation of Italian Fascist violence and minimised Italians' agency and responsibility for such violence. Generated by nationals wishing to preserve the notion of Italians as brava gente (good people), 2 German emigrés such as Hannah Arendt, who concluded that Italy was a 'non-totalitarian or, at the most, semitotalitarian' state, 3 or a broad Anglo-American tradition of caricaturising Mussolini as a 'sawdust Caesar' and submissive follower of Hitler, such interpretations of Italian Fascism as a 'lesser evil' allowed its actual evil to be assumed but often not empirically documented. 4 It is worth recalling that for over a decade following the First World