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Abstract
This article will discuss propaganda in the press used by the Italian fascist regime to create and disseminate a negative image of France and socialism. The ‘Paris, 1937’ exhibition represented a pretext for the Italian press to attack the Popular Front on both policy and competence. Manipulating information, the propaganda fabricated an idea of ‘otherness’, presenting France as the chaotic antithesis to the orderly Italian regime. France was presented as a country full of drunks and idlers, as a nation descending into chaos due to the social economic reforms of the Blum government; images that were juxtaposed with a state thriving under fascist corporatism. With the use of archive files and press-clippings, this work intends to illustrate the construction of stereotypes to feed the fear of socialism in Italy by the fascist press.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The newspapers cited in this article were published during period from January 1936 to March 1938, that is to say from the first moments of the preparatory process for the Italian pavilion until the closing day of ‘Paris, 1937’. The newspapers consulted were Il Corriere della Sera and Il Popolo d’Italia. The Corriere represents a traditional expression of the Italian bourgeoisie that even under fascism was able to maintain a good few pages dedicated to culture. Il Popolo d’Italia, the official organ of the Fascist Party, reflected the Regime’s point of view, its sole function was to be the Regime’s official bulletin. Il Popolo d’Italia’s international news articles, were sourced from stories filed by the fascist-controlled Agenzia Stefani news agency, which were themselves directly inspired by the ministerial veline, a system of circulars which instructed news outlets to cover stories from a particular angle or recommended what stories to avoid. Il Popolo d’Italia was especially focused on provincial distribution.
2. ‘the two pavilions have been dismissed in architectural terms as having merely ‘competed in archaeological rhetoric’ (Udovicki, ‘Facing Hitler’s Pavilion’, 13).
3. Propaganda studies ‘the different theories and practices focused on the construction of the social imaginaries through methods of communication’ (Vazquez Liñàn, ‘La guerra es la paz’, 2).
4. Vatican newspapers, which in those years reached a circulation of 250,000 copies, were able to avoid censorship, because they were officially classed as foreign-based. They provided readers with a half-column summary of banned foreign news in Italian.
5. Isnenghi, ‘Iconografia Della Stampa Fascista’, 344.
6. Foresti, Credere, obbedire, combattere, 35–67.
7. Isnenghi, ‘L’educazione dell’italiano’, 157.
8. In April 1937, Mussolini had set up an anti-Communist Studies Centre whose function was to produce propaganda material for fascist organisations and to act as an observatory on the Soviet situation for the fascist party leadership.
9. French NUPIE to Felice Guarneri, 17 March 1937, Central Archives of the State (Rome).
10. ‘Paris remains under Muscovite influence’ was announced in a headline in Il Popolo d’Italia.
11. Longanesi to Pettinato, 23 July 1937. Concetto Pettinato Archive. Fondazione Ugo Spirito (FUS).
12. De Rossi to Maraini, 22 November 1936. Antonio Maraini Archive – National Gallery of Modern Art – Rome (GNAM), ‘Regolamento, giuria, relazione’.
13. Seidman, ‘The Birth of the Weekend’, 266.
14. Ibid., 273.
15. The text was accompanied by a photograph of Blum, immortalized as he spoke to the audience from a stage over which hung a banner with the words: ‘The exhibition opening May 1 is a victory of anti-fascism’.
16. Pica, ‘Il padiglione italiano’, 251.
17. ‘the muted struggle between the minds that conceived the exhibition and the left-wing unionized hands, which delayed the work, still exists even now’ (Il Corriere della Sera, 15 July 1937).
18. Longanesi to Pettinato, 1 March 1937, FUS.
19. Seidman, ‘The Birth of the Weekend’, 295.
20. Brunelleschi to Maraini, GNAM, ‘Corrispondenza con Brunelleschi e Artisti italiani residenti A Parigi’.
21. This refers to the Croix-de-Feu, a French far-right political league.
22. Gentile defines fascism as an unprecedented political and social movement, totalitarian, nationalist, modernist, mystic and palingenetic which was developed in Italy after the First World War. This movement established a ‘national political religion’, the ‘cult of the littorio’, where propaganda played a major role in the spread of the political and social fascist ideal and became a fundamental tool towards achieving the expected Italian renewal. The pyramidal and centralized organisation of the only propagandistic line (usually identified with that of the single party), as well as the repression of dissent, are concepts commonly used when defining totalitarianism. There are authors such as Postoutenko who have proposed to analyse the ‘totalitarian practices’ that can arise even in democratic governments.