Benito Mussolini’s 1936 declaration of a new Italian Empire marked the achievement of a significant long-term goal for the regime, but the Duce certainly did not see it as the endgame for Fascist Italy. Rather, it signaled the beginning of a new era in Italian history.1 The successful conquest of Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia supposedly verified the rejuvenation of the Italian race Mussolini and his regime had worked to inspire for the previous fourteen years; it solidified the return of Roman dominance that had once defined the Western world. The project then became—in the years between when Vittorio Emanuele III received his new title as emperor and Italy entered World War II—to develop a race of New Italians who identified as entitled imperialists just as much as conscientious nationalists.2
As the preceding chapters have shown, the regime steadily developed increasingly totalitarian policies and restrictive racial rhetoric in order to further delineate the contours of a healthy Italian race. The period from 1938 to 1940 was no different in this regard; indeed, it faced some of the most dramatic legal and bureaucratic shifts in the Fascist racial campaign to identify and improve the race in the swiftest and most effective ways possible. Italy’s imperial campaign in Ethiopia had come out of a longer and more ambitious racial project, but it also triggered an acceleration of the state’s exclusionary dictates for the Italian race. The codification of racial segregation in Italian East Africa (AOI) shortly after Mussolini’s May 1936 victory speech had largely resulted from preexisting understandings of race and colonial rule and especially from the perceived inability of Italians to honor their racial superiority outside the peninsula. Similar frustrations with the lack of sufficient progress in Italians’ racial strength and awareness—despite the proclaimed successes in Ethiopia—were likewise articulated in the most radical and restrictive racial policies yet seen within the borders of Italy.3
Of perhaps greatest significance in this latest stage of the Fascist racial campaign was the July 14, 1938, article in the Giornale d’Italia titled “Italian Fascism and the Problems of the Razza,” which announced, “Human razze exist.” Allegedly written by a group of racial scientists and laying to rest a long-standing debate among Italian politicians and academics, the article explained, “The existence of human razze is not an abstraction of our spirit, but rather it corresponds to a reality that is unique, material, and perceptible with our senses.”4 This was the first of ten points enumerated in the document, later dubbed the Manifesto of Race, that many, perhaps even most, scholars and observers have declared the cornerstone of Fascism’s official domestic racial policies.5 Of course, the document’s insistence on prejudice against so-called inferior races within Italian borders was not especially novel in pragmatic terms, since the regime had consciously discriminated against Slavic and German speakers, as well as other “non-Italians” since the 1920s. Instead, the component that appeared to be the most dramatic theoretical departure from previous Fascist doctrine was its identification of physical biology as the most important factor in the Fascist definition of race, thereby providing a “scientific” justification for future racial laws. Further, what writers have widely cited as the most jarring aspect of the manifesto was its clear articulation that Italians belonged to the Aryan race and that any Jews who lived in the empire were not members of that race.
Combined, these decrees and the ensuing racial regulations legally transformed the experience of Italian Fascism throughout Italy and its colonies; despite the new “scientific” thrust of the language, however, its theoretical substance ultimately did not prove to be a remarkable departure from the foundational concepts of race—and particularly the Italian race—that Fascist officials had articulated for at least the previous sixteen years and that would remain intact for the remainder of Mussolini’s time in power. Certainly, a new and significant wave of discrimination, violence, and suffering throughout the empire resulted from the racial policies of the late 1930s. The supposedly scientific underpinning of this latest stage in Fascist racism affected the lives of millions of non-Italians and Italians through new economic and political restrictions and more aggressive eugenic measures. At the same time, the Fascist education system—and many of the state’s other institutions—had worked from the earliest days of Mussolini’s rule to instill concrete conceptions of Italian racial identity and to form New Italians who could assert Italy’s racial prowess in perpetuity. The successful integration of this latest and most aggressive layer of criteria into Italian identity directly depended on popular familiarity with Fascism’s racial principles as educators had, in theory, explained to young Italians throughout the ventennio. And while the school system, too, underwent noteworthy bureaucratic changes in this period—particularly in response to Giuseppe Bottai’s 1939 School Charter—the regime still promoted the central role of the inherited Italian spirit as the core of the Italian race.6
Mirroring this steady accretion of racial theory and legal discrimination, Fascist officials found themselves simultaneously arguing for the consistency of Fascist racial doctrine and the novelty of the 1938 and 1939 racial policies. Writers insisted that the “Fascist demographic policy, in reality, though not separate from its secular roots in the Roman and Italian tradition, is nevertheless something completely new, original, revolutionary.”7 In short, rather than completely transforming the substance of Fascist racism, the ideas of the Manifesto of Race and their legal consequences pronounced the latest layer of specificity within a body of principles that had been in constant evolution since the establishment of the Fascist state in 1922.
Without a doubt, the official declaration that race was a biological category and that Italians belonged to the Aryan race was a substantial departure from previous Fascist rhetoric and established the foundation for a new direction in Fascist racial law.8 Of course, modern theories of race had depended on some conception of biological inheritance at least since the Enlightenment. For the first time under Fascist rule, however, the Manifesto of Race formally declared physical characteristics as the most important component that composed the category of race.9 Even in light of the obvious intensification of Fascist racial policies in the decade leading up to the publication of the manifesto, the social, economic, and political consequences of this new language were striking. In October 1938 Mussolini and the Fascist Grand Council released its own Statement on Race, which officially declared “the urgent reality of the racial problems and the necessity of a racial conscience following the conquest of the empire.” For sixteen years, the document reminded readers, the state had pursued the quantitative and qualitative improvement of the Italian race, and all that work had the potential to be compromised if the regime did not address the threats of miscegenation and other “debasements” currently present in the empire.10
Consequently, the regime established new legal codes in August, September, and October 1938; Italians were no longer allowed to marry anyone from the Hamitic, Semitic, or other non-Aryan races. Furthermore, marriages between Italians, as well as between Italians and foreign Aryans, could be prohibited at the behest of the Ministry of the Interior if they were deemed detrimental to the health of the race.11 Prior to a civil marriage, all men and women needed to prove their “racial purity”; in this way, the racial scientist Guido Landra believed, “the race is radically defended from all causes of biological, political, and spiritual degeneration that results from miscegenation.”12 The celebrated Fascist educator Paolo Orano further explained that the Fascist state had always “been in the vanguard of nations in the decisive will to redeem the race and rid it of degenerative habits and pernicious doctrines.”13 Not just anyone could marry—only those Italians who could protect and strengthen the race as a whole could gain that right. In their broadest sense, these were racial laws that, like Fascism’s previous racial policies, pitted Italians against so-called non-Italians.14
As part of this more expansive project to ensure the full Fascistization of the Italian race, the state also passed a number of cultural laws in 1938 and 1939 that further prescribed the behavior and appearance of the New Italian. Primary among these new laws was the announcement that all Italian troops and youth organizations were required to march using the passo romano. According to Mussolini, this “Roman” version of the goose step had the dual purpose of creating an even greater, more uniform national military culture while also recalling, once again, the proud history of ancient Rome.15 Additionally, Mussolini announced the replacement of the pronoun voi for the formal mode of address Lei in referring to the second person singular. While a seemingly subtle change, the attempt to reformulate the basic terms with which Italians communicated—creating a classless style of speech—connoted yet another way in which the Duce hoped to create the New Italian and the new Italian Empire.16 It was clear that even after sixteen years in power, the Fascist regime still had grave concerns about the success of its campaign for bonifica umana; combined with the new marriage laws, these practices were meant to accelerate the process.17
In spite of these more universal racial policies, many contemporaries and subsequent scholars have identified the racial legislation of this period as first and foremost anti-Semitic, largely in response to the numerous measures that specifically affected Italy’s domestic and foreign Jewish populations. The Grand Council’s Statement on Race argued that the immigration of foreign (Jewish) elements, particularly since 1933, had impaired the Italian Jewish opinion of and relationship with the regime; and because state policies needed to reflect the urgent necessity for national unity, any Jewish influence on the Italian race needed to be neutralized.18 Thus, all foreign Jews who had settled in Italy after 1922 were obligated to leave or transfer to one of a number of internment camps, many of which were already well established.19 Jewish nationals were no longer allowed membership in the PNF, entry into the military, responsibility in any munitions industries, or management of Aryan domestics.20 There were certain exceptions to these requirements, particularly for Italian Jews (and their families) who had participated in the Fascist Revolution or any national war or who had joined the PNF before the March on Rome, but the regime would withdraw these exemptions by the time Italy entered the war in June 1940.21
Many scholars have contended that the Manifesto of Race signaled the beginning of the domestic Fascist racial campaign because of these substantial legal developments. And yet this book has shown that racism was a crucial component of Fascist ideology at least since 1922. Therefore, perhaps what is most useful to understanding the role these latest developments played in Fascist doctrine is a look at the logic exposed in the Fascist Grand Council’s own Statement on Race. In this document, a one-sentence paragraph stated, “The Jewish problem is nothing but a metropolitan aspect of a problem of a more general character.”22 In other words, the anti-Semitic portions of these new racial laws merely represented another facet of the regime’s larger and longer-term goal to refine and strengthen the Italian race. In fact, even as the first anniversary of the Manifesto of Race passed in the summer of 1939, officials and the press continued to emphasize the ultimate goal of the new racial policies as primarily “to elevate our prestige as Aryans and as Romans,” not, it would seem, as anti-Semites.23 Such rationale is supported both by evidence from the previous sixteen years of Fascist rule and the elaboration of racial policies and education over the following two.
In writing about the Manifesto of Race, the sitting secretary of the PNF in 1938, Achille Starace, stated, “Even in this field, the regime has followed its fundamental course: first action and then doctrinal formulation, which should never be considered academic—that is, an end in and of itself—but as a decisive action as part of a greater political clarification.”24 Even at this late date in the regime, the Fascist principle of “action over words” remained in practice and quite useful to a state that continued to feel its way through the creation of its ideal Italy and Italian race. Certainly, the newest racial legislation changed the political and economic lives of Italians and non-Italians throughout the peninsula, islands, and colonies. Nevertheless, a closer look at how scholars and officials worked to define the category of race in the years 1938 to 1940 indicates a much more semantic shift in, rather than significant theoretical reevaluation of, Fascist racism.
Despite the supposedly clear-cut definitions articulated in the manifesto, other scholarly articles and official documents of the period suggest there was still quite a bit of racial theory for Fascist scholars and officials to debate. Mussolini and representatives of his state had used the term razza throughout the Fascist period—and indeed some linguists even argued for the Italian roots of the very concept—but the new scientific thrust of the word appeared to require a more in-depth look at its meaning and the role it played in Fascist doctrine.25 Giacomo Acerbo—the prominent Fascist economist, party official, and author of the 1923 law establishing the legal framework for the Fascist takeover of the Italian parliament—explored these questions in his 1940 treatise on the fundamentals of Fascist racism. In this ninety-five-page essay, Acerbo explained that there were actually four generic classifications of racial theory: popular (or pseudoscientific), historical, naturalistic, and spiritual. Still, he claimed, there was a common starting point for all these interpretations: all of them “assign somatic, linguistic, and cultural properties as characteristics of a particular group.”26 As a whole, then, Acerbo effectively echoed long-standing Fascist views of race by explaining that the components of a race were physical, historical, cultural, and spiritual all at once. Additionally, he argued, the Fascist application of all four classifications had the fundamental aim “to preserve the ideal and spiritual substance of our stirpe.”27 In essence, the particulars of the definition of race did not matter nearly as much as the intent behind its use.
Supporting this definition that argued for the equal importance of a race’s physical, spiritual, cultural, and historical attributes, an article in The Rights of the School proclaimed, “Anthropologists agree with the designation of the term razza as a human group that has the same anatomical and physiological characteristics. . . . But anthropologists also agree that every razza has its own predetermined psychological and linguistic characteristics that, combined with the physical characteristics, distinguish human categories with greater precision.”28 Physical traits were the most obvious racial designators, but they were certainly not the only ones.
Nicola Pende, founder of the eugenic pseudoscience of constitutionalism and a prominent supporter of Nazi racism, also agreed with this analysis of race and, in the remarkably turgid prose of one 1938 article, used it to discuss the specific example of Fascist policy. According to Pende, the Fascist state had always allowed for many ethnicities (racial subdivisions) within the Italian nation, but it wanted to impose on its people an understanding of the “Italic” race as a “spiritual type with a biological foundation.” Explaining this need further, Pende echoed long-familiar racial rhetoric: “The biological Italic type, which has many original racial elements, in the course of its history, is physically and psychologically nothing less than the progeny of Rome, because it is mother Rome that for millennia knew how to assimilate and amalgamate peoples of European races that were morphologically and psychologically different, in order to form a romano-italico type, that persists from the time of Roman Italy, and that has an ethnic profile in a biological sense, which cannot be confused with other national types, even in the great sphere of Latin families.”29
Despite the new veneer of biological determinism on the Fascist definition of race and the new classification of the Italian race as Aryan, the familiar language of Italy’s historic and spiritual inherence maintained its presence in much of the Fascist racial literature.30 Fundamental to all these definitions was the clear goal of distinguishing one racial category from others. Carlo Pino, in his January 1939 article in the party journal Hierarchy (Gerarchia), explained that the regime’s racial policies were “inspired by discrimination, which is a derivative of racial pride; however, this pride can only draw power from the objective appraisal of other races.”31
Proponents of the Fascist demographic and pronatalist campaigns continued to write most emphatically about the less visible—spiritual, historical, and moral—constituents of razza. One author for the ONMI periodical Motherhood and Childhood asserted, “I have said that civilization and history have made the idea of razza possible. Let me explain: razza is a reflection of a specific people . . . in order to recover its ideal unity, it does not matter whether it is based upon blood or spirit.”32 Another author explained that, in Fascist doctrine, race “is not a simple anthropological or biological concept, but it is all of our humanity, material and spirit, that is realized in the family.” To expand on this idea, he continued to explain that the “racial and demographic policies in Italy are two aspects, or perhaps the same aspect, of one reality, since all of the adopted measures for an increase in population were accompanied by measures for the defense of the razza.”33 Ultimately, then, these spokesmen for the regime’s demographic campaign reasserted the essential collaboration of spiritual and physical strength in the rejuvenation of the Italian race.
As part of this larger discussion of the definition of razza, writers in the last years of the 1930s frequently made a clear distinction between the concepts of race and nation, despite their close connections; moreover, they overwhelmingly emphasized the priority of protecting the race over the nation. As one party article explained, “A people is not truly a people if it does not have a sense of nation. At the same time, a nation cannot emerge in the world if it does not have a sense of razza.” The article clarified further, “The most basic nationalism exists in a pride for one’s blood.”34 More to the point, the editor of In Defense of the Race (La difesa della razza) and one of the most vocal racists of this period, Telesio Interlandi, simply declared, “The concept of razza supersedes that of nation.”35 These declarations of the explicit and unquestionable supremacy of race over nation were new to Fascist rhetoric, though, by and large, the individual meanings of the terms still appeared to overlap substantially.
The theories and definitions of individual officials and scientists give us a sense of the intellectual debate surrounding this newest phase of Fascist racism, but they ultimately remain only pieces in the larger picture of Fascist rhetoric and policy.36 Educational texts of the period 1938 to 1940, on the other hand, provide important, and in many ways more accurate, insight into the fundamental messages the government wanted the population to absorb about race and nation. These textbooks, teaching manuals, and pedagogical journals further highlight the gulf between the legal ramifications of the manifesto and the relatively consistent elementary education in the principles of Fascist racial doctrine.
Still in 1940, when the PNF published the second and final volume of its guide to political education for students in elementary school and middle school, which was aptly named The Fascist’s Second Book (Il secondo libro del Fascista), the matter of finite racial categories was still not settled. While the first volume of this Fascist catechism, published in 1937, had focused its lessons primarily on the Fascist Revolution, Party, and state, the second volume laid additional emphasis on educating its audience about the specifics of contemporary Fascist racial theory and policy. The author explained, “The existing physical and spiritual differences between the principal razze, the secondary razze, and the various stirpi of a single razza are dependent upon a considerable number of factors, not all of which have yet been identified.”37 Of course, the admitted complexity of the subject in no way negated or even lessened the importance of the “evident inferiority of certain races” and the need to protect the Italian race from such contaminants.38 This lesson, printed in a book meant to convey the official party creed, well illustrates the fact that the question of terminology, particularly the definition razza, continued to occupy the time and energy of numerous officials and educators.
The author of The Fascist’s Second Book later outlined the nature of Italy’s racial constitution to the nation’s youth using a familiar story: “In the expansion of the Roman Empire, and after its collapse, other peoples still belonging to the white razza and predominantly of Nordic origin came to Italy, entering the orbit of Roman civilization and the racial unity of the nation.”39 The text then injected this long-established historical narrative with the new equation of Italians with Aryans when it explained that the “Mediterranean basin was and still is the sphere of the greatest splendors of this continuity of the Aryan primacy, with Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, and Fascism.”40 Notwithstanding this new racial classification, the account maintained the familiar argument that select (ancient) foreign races did not contaminate italianità but rather were absorbed into its essence, enriching and strengthening it. Just as striking was the suggestion of similarity between the legacies—historical, cultural, and racial—of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Fascism. The strength of Fascism and its New Italians was not confined to the borders of the Italian Kingdom or the current reign of the regime. It was an identity that was far more expansive in its presence and power.
Another text geared toward illuminating the fundamentals of Fascism to the party’s youngest members added to this discussion by actually merging the concepts of razza and nation. This 1939 booklet created for the Turin section of the GIL posed the question, “What is the Italian nation?” In response, the text explained, “It is the entirety of all Italians who, belonging to the same razza, recognize themselves as united by the same traditions and aspirations; that they worship God in the same language, that they want to obey the same state authority.”41 While this abbreviated definition of the Italian nation did not explain the term razza, it very clearly relied on the principle that a nation’s population was defined by inherited characteristics—an idea that did not differ dramatically from lessons earlier in the 1930s.
Finally, in his 1940 book La scuola del Balilla, Giuseppe Giovanazzi argued for the great importance of prioritizing the Italian race—and nation—over Italy’s many component regions once and for all. He remarked that while children were children everywhere, in Italy they also had to become Italian. Such an Italian child could be described as “he who plays and enjoys himself, sings and draws, recites and dances, reads and writes and counts; but always, whether he marches in line through the streets of the fatherland or works in the serenity of the classroom, he feels and thinks, and gradually he strengthens in his feelings and thoughts the idea of being Italian, a conscious part and participant of a great community, whose glorious history confirms the faith and guarantees the right to a greater future.” Giovanazzi concluded, “Why should a regional spirit be emphasized in the child when it clearly has forfeited its place to the national spirit?”42 In fact, the reasons for eliminating region-specific lessons in elementary textbooks were so obvious to the author that it was “unnecessary to speak of them.”43 Italian collective identity now more than ever needed to focus on racial and national characteristics; and in the words of Giovanazzi, “Italy, for our child, means Fascism: that which Fascism has made and continues to make valuable; that which it makes and prepares, in our souls as much as our labors, in order continually to render the future Italy more glorious.”44 This rationale for a more focused model of italianità reflected the theory of this latest phase of Fascist racism, but it also appeared to sound the death knell for Gentile’s principle of organic learning, which had been increasingly under attack over the course of the 1930s. Mussolini’s sustained anxiety about the lack of unity within the Italian race, while not upsetting the bedrock of Fascist racial pedagogy, would urge the reevaluation of the state’s elementary education system just as it would the nation’s racial legislation.
The elementary school system was consistently a vital instrument of the Fascist racial campaign; in these last two years before Italy’s entanglement with the Second World War, its mission appeared to take on increasing urgency. The regime viewed the earliest stages of one’s education as the time when, as the children’s author Nazareno Padellaro wrote, students recognized their responsibilities to the state and the “ideal of collaboration for the grandeur of the fatherland.” The students were “rigorously pure” in a racial sense, as they generally had not yet encountered the corrupting forces of foreign races, political enemies, or vices. Therefore, they could and needed to learn about their place in building up the power of the nation. Padellaro persisted, “Oriented toward this principle, the Italian school does not ask much more of the students than to prepare themselves and learn, except to live the life of the fatherland in every gesture, in every emotion.”45 In particular, many pedagogues viewed a child’s earliest years in school as the most important for his or her education, as they constructed the cultural and social framework for the future citizens of Italy. More to the point, Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai explained in a memo to school officials, “In the earliest stages of school, with the means to form the minds of children, one will be able to create an appropriate climate in which to form an early, embryonic racial consciousness, while in middle school the more elevated mental development of the adolescents—already in contact with the humanistic tradition regarding the study of classical languages, history, and literature—will allow for the fundamentals of racial doctrine to establish their hold.”46 The enduring goal of creating generations trained to think in terms of Fascist racial ideals—physical and moral strength, obedience, courage, virility, and discipline—had acquired a renewed sense of importance in elementary education.
In the years 1938 to 1940, Bottai and the MEN contributed to the regime’s racial campaign with two related projects that reevaluated the education system’s own policies and infrastructure. First came new rules in 1938 to discriminate more aggressively against so-called non-Italians, and second was Bottai’s second major piece of Fascist legislation, the School Charter (Carta della scuola), which adjusted the educational demands on Italians to develop more successfully into faithful and productive New Italians.
In some ways, the simpler task in front of Bottai was establishing education policies in line with the new racial, and especially the new anti-Semitic, legislation. Mere weeks after the publication of the Manifesto of Race, Bottai wrote a memo refusing all future requests for travel abroad to individuals who wanted to represent the nation in any way—such as attending a conference or program of study—and who did not belong to the most updated definition of the Italian race.47 Then, in early September, he signed off on a number of decrees regarding the “defense of the race” in the public schools. Jews were no longer allowed to attend public or semipublic schools, and the government ordered the establishment of separate, exclusively Jewish elementary schools.48 Textbooks authored by non-Italians were no longer allowed in circulation within Italian schools.49 Jewish teachers, too, were required to relinquish their positions immediately, as were Jewish academics, though at this point Jewish university students were allowed to continue their studies if they were already registered in a program.50 Such policies were, in theory, to rid the school system of the most obvious examples of non-Italians.
The second piece of this two-pronged educational attack on the remaining weaknesses within the Italian race was a bit more complicated, and Bottai would not publicize his comprehensive approach to the problem—his School Charter—until 1939. However, the underlying aim of this more encompassing project—and of the Fascist racial campaign more generally—was no surprise: to instill in all Fascist students the ideals of the New Italian and the demands of the New Italy. In a circular written for educators and school officials at the end of 1938, Bottai reminded his personnel, “The Fascist school is the place in which the youth of the new spirit of the peninsula is born and called to unite . . . in order ever more profoundly to understand the reasons for living as men and citizens.” Therefore, he continued, it was the obligation of all who supported the school system to teach their wards the “Fascist style”—that is, manliness (without apparent regard for femininity), severity, strength, and dignity—so that these young Italians could prepare to lead the Italy of tomorrow.51
When Bottai did unveil his charter—what would be the most significant overhaul of the Fascist education system since the 1923 Gentile Reform and of which he was quite proud—the legislation intensified the MEN’s Fascistization efforts in two ways: first, by further centralizing school administration and, second, by further politicizing the lessons to which students were exposed at school.52 As Bottai wrote to Mussolini on February 4, 1939, “For a reform in the system, of this or that gadget, a law can suffice; for a reform of the system, one needs a clarification of principles, each one of which is an introduction to an array of laws.”53 The legislation aimed to ensure a totalitarian educational system, bureaucratically as well as pedagogically; the MEN required the schools, GIL, and community at large to work together to mold the New Italians, who would one day lead the nation and race. The MEN billed the School Charter as a complete redesign of the education system, creating a structure of public institutions that would more effectively train New Italians of the New Italy.
Conceptually, the charter paralleled the organization of Bottai’s 1927 Labor Charter (Carta del lavoro) in its twenty-nine chapters that reorganized the Fascist school system, and the majority of the charter addressed infrastructural modifications to the education system.54 In many ways, this document merely codified changes to the educational infrastructure that had been taking place over the previous decade against great protest from educational idealists such as Gentile. Nevertheless, taken as a whole, the changes that the charter demanded were significant enough to warrant their implementation over two years. The regime would devote the first year to renovating completely the nation’s nursery, elementary, vocational, and artisan schools.
For the first time, preschool was required for all children between the ages of four and six, and the new elementary school curriculum consisted of only three grades, generally for students between the ages of six and nine. The spiritual education, on which Gentile had focused so intently in the 1920s, still played a critical role in the elementary phase of an Italian’s education, but the reforms Bottai and his charter laid out very much responded to the increased sense that most Italians’ obligations to the state required them primarily to develop practical skills in order to make tangible contributions to the empire. Therefore, after the third grade, students were expected to attend a vocational school (scuola del lavoro) for two years—where they received early training in the professions they were encouraged to pursue—in addition to continuing their studies in core academic subjects. After this program, students who passed placement exams could continue on to classical middle schools.
Those students who did not plan to go on to a classical middle school were to train at a craft school (scuola artigiana) instead of the more basic vocational school, and it was the aim of the MEN that a much larger proportion of Italian students take this path to be truly productive members of the empire. One observer of these changes remarked that elementary education “prepares to discharge its responsibility as a totalitarian school, drawing upon its energies in the indestructible desire to bring the entire Italian population to a level of civil maturity that corresponds to the projects it carries out today and, even more importantly, tomorrow.”55 At these craft schools, students would learn the essential skills needed to join the nation’s workforce, usually as factory workers, farmers, or day laborers, as soon as they met their educational requirements.56 According to Bottai’s published diary, when he and Mussolini discussed the charter, Mussolini commented, “If I understand this correctly, and I believe I do, you want even little gentlemen to learn how to get their hands dirty. I like it!”57 This rhetoric diverged from the organic education that Gentile prescribed for elementary education in the early 1920s, but it continued an objective of the 1923 Gentile Reform for the upper schools to professionalize the youth at an earlier age, reducing the number of students in higher education and expanding the national workforce more quickly.
The School Charter also devoted a section to the subject of girls’ education, both despite and in response to the emphasis on “manliness” in Fascist education. It plainly stated that “the social goal and mission of the woman, distinct in Fascist life,” required separate institutions.58 The pedagogue Antonino Pagliaro helped articulate this position when he explained that the role of Fascist education for girls needed to reflect women’s position in Fascist society at large and to reject “the absurd presupposition of equality with that of the man.” Above all, Pagliaro summed up, the charter’s prescriptions for gendered education honored the position that the woman was the guardian of the “spiritual assets” essential to the continuity and strength of the Italian race.59 Just as interesting, the charter explained that the three-year educational program designed specifically to prepare girls for their role as homemakers and teachers (if they were to enter a profession) began only after the completion of elementary and vocational school. Whether because of racial or practical considerations, Fascist educators continued to believe in the value of young Italian girls learning basic academic subjects, a fact that is often, and understandably, overlooked in light of Fascism’s overwhelmingly misogynistic outlook.
While the charter addressed the issue of gendered education, it perhaps surprisingly avoided the subject of rural education, even though educational texts and mass propaganda continued to encourage a national ruralization movement. At least part of this omission must be attributed to the fact that this important aspect of national education received separate orders for reorganization in late 1938. On October 14, 1938, the government passed legislation further delineating the goals of the rural school system and signaling the state’s relentless desire for more control over the rural population. As the MEN report explained, “Rural schools must serve the rural population, and this is a conquest that imposes specific organizational forms and programmatic differences from the general school system. This is not to say that the rural population is inferior to other citizens. It does, however, comprise a category of workers that has a right to a school of its own, with an academic system appropriate for its professional goals.”60 Subsequently, the government announced that each rural school was to have no fewer than twenty and no more than 250 students at a given time, limiting the teacher-student ratio and expanding the rural school system. In turn, the MEN established 169 rural directorates, each one overseeing forty-five to fifty schools.61 Furthermore, at the end of the 1938–39 school year, Minister Bottai informed all rural teachers that a series of courses on Fascist culture would be instituted especially for their edification and, through them, the edification of their students.62
Such modifications to its structure continued to centralize and politicize the education system for a portion of the population that had always been less accessible to the regime and its demands. Fascism, one journalist wrote, “as the restorer of the strength and dignity of the nation, as the undaunted glorifier of the bright sources of the grandeur of the stirpe,” had focused great attention on the land and “the robust farmers, who are the fertile custodians of the purity of the razza.”63 According to the Fascist state, the rural population remained the greatest carrier of italianità; and while the authenticity of its italianità needed to be protected, it also needed to be molded enough to embody all Fascist ideals. This demand necessitated an educational infrastructure only possible with the products of modernization. One author clarified the resolution of this conflict as resting in the moral education of the people: “It is not enough simply to live on the land, as a peasant, to retain unaltered characteristics of the razza. . . . Whoever renounces the city . . . must be supported by that moral well-being that can only give a true sympathy, not occasional, not partisan, not academic, but constant, sincere, and productive, as part of the people who live in contact with the most evolved form of life.”64 It was not enough to live in the countryside, the regime contended; the rural population needed to be trained in the morals that would enable them to absorb and appreciate the benefits of their rural life.
Finally—though also not specifically mentioned in the legislation of Bottai’s School Charter—the nation’s summer and climate colonies continued to play an essential auxiliary role in the school system and the national public health campaign. Now almost entirely under the auspices of the GIL, these camps had expanded considerably since they were first established; one journalist reported that in 1938 their numbers had risen to five thousand, servicing approximately eight hundred thousand children in that year alone. And there were more plans to expand, particularly into the new colonial territories of East Africa and Albania.65 As always, these camps were meant to expose children—and especially urban children—to the health benefits of the outdoors but also to reinforce the lessons of the classroom in discipline, hygiene, history, and pride that had “such great effect on the spiritual formation of their campers.”66
All these bureaucratic changes—or expansions—to the education system were meant to service the second, larger goal of the School Charter and, as the previous chapter illustrated, Bottai’s mission as minister of national education: to politicize the education system as part of Mussolini’s totalitarian project for the Italian race. While such an objective had been discussed since the rise of the regime, the charter made it official that education was no longer a process individuals undertook; students had to embrace it as a small piece of the Fascist collective.67 The pedagogue Giovanni Giovanazzi argued that the old school system had lacked passion; in response, the charter inspired “the moral, political, and economic unity of the nation” through state education.68 As such, the charter’s first proclamation stated, “In the moral, political, and economic unity of the Italian nation . . . the school—the first foundation of solidarity among all social forces . . .—forms the human and political awareness of the new generations.” Such a directive, the statement reminded its readers, was inspired by “the eternal virtues of the Italian razza and its civilization.”69
The charter’s second section followed this affirmation of the school system’s national significance with the introduction of what it determined was the regime’s new notion of “scholastic obligation.” Meeting one’s academic commitments had become just as important as fulfilling one’s military service—in fact, honoring the first would be excellent preparation for the second. Moreover, the larger purpose of such a scholastic obligation, according to Bottai, was to have each student “integrate and follow his education on a political and an athletic-military plane.”70 The school system and the GIL, in the words of the charter, “formed a united instrument of education.”71 Bottai and the MEN viewed these combined efforts as central to “the formation of the political and military man of Fascism.”72 This partnership was much more obvious after the 1937 decree mandating that all children belong to a Fascist youth organization. Physical education was labeled a critical element of the academic schedule and was given parity with all other subjects.73 Giovanazzi further explained that, jointly, schools and the GIL responded to all the needs of the young spirit: “passion, aspirations for improvement, love of risk, need for personal initiative, courage in voluntary discipline, the body always dominated by the spirit . . . religious and Fascist faith, concrete sense of humanity.”74 These were the characteristics that were to be emphasized in the future leaders of the Fascist empire.
Beyond these two expansive state organizations, the School Charter also emphasized that the effective education of Italy’s youth depended on the participation of each student’s family and the community at large. The seventh chapter of the new legislation pointedly reminded Italians of the essential role the Italian family played in educating and strengthening the nation and race. It bears noting that such stress on the importance of the family inadvertently brought attention to Fascist fears about its relative lack of control over this realm of the young Italian’s life.75 This was not a new concept in Fascist political and educational philosophy, either in theory or in practice. Still, the reiteration of the state’s expectation that all social institutions, including the family, were responsible for furthering Fascist educational goals confirmed the totalitarian aim of the Fascist state at large.
In part as a response to such continued concerns regarding the extent of state control over private life, the ERR continued to be influential in both the centralization and politicization projects of this latest phase of Fascist racism. Its mission was to ensure a broad reception of key political and cultural propaganda and to bypass the subjective filters of individual families and teachers. What is perhaps most interesting about the scholastic broadcasts during this period is that the Commission for Elementary School Radio Programs decided not to “dedicate any individual program to racial propaganda.” The official statement, printed in the introduction to the radio transcripts for the 1938–39 academic year, did, however, encourage teachers to “draw conclusions from the programs that praise our heroes and the activities of the regime, in order to heighten the students’ pride in their race that is the foundation of our great future.”76
In addition to the weekly programs of the ERR, the state’s umbrella broadcast corporation, the Italian Organization for Radio Programming (EIAR), also produced a number of radio programs for Italian children that addressed both their mental and physical education.77 Officials from the EIAR wrote in their annual report for 1938–39 (year XVII of the regime) that “the advantages of these radio programs are evident and undeniable in terms of national education, mass unification, and disciplined uniformity in political and social life.”78 To educate Italy’s children in such a manner, radio stations began each day with stretching exercises at 7:45. At lunchtime they summarized the news, and at 4:40 p.m. they broadcast a show known as Comrades of the Balilla and Piccole Italiane. The contents of this latter show varied each day, but all episodes were to have the listeners’ “intellectual and cultural life as motivation.” The secondary, though no less important, role of the program was to “practically establish relationships, contacts, and exchanges between children of various provinces and regions, contributing to that reciprocal awareness from which friendship is born.”79 In addition to programming for classrooms of all ages, GIL outings, and parents, the ERR and EIAR also teamed up to develop special transmissions to and from the various summer and climate colonies throughout the peninsula and islands to remind everyone of their great importance in the Fascist racial project.80 Hence, though the regime did not harness the educational power of radio technology until the 1930s, it worked diligently in those years to make up for lost time.81 The expansion of national radio broadcasts—and the radios that aired them—coincided very purposefully with the attempts to reduce attention to Italian regionalism and, more generally, with the Fascist necessity of reaching and influencing as many Italians as possible.
Thus, 1938 and 1939 witnessed a sizeable number of legal and institutional transformations within the Fascist state to adhere to more-restrictive ideations of the Italian race and racial fitness that followed the publication of the Manifesto of Race. Yet a closer look at the discussions surrounding the evolving definitions of race in this period shows little substantive change in Italian racial theory. Even Giuseppe Bottai’s 1939 School Charter, which represented the latest call for a totalitarian and politicized education system that trained students to embody ideal New Italians and to exclude designated non-Italians, while making a number of infrastructural changes, largely reflected pedagogical reforms that had been in development throughout the 1930s. The modified and expanded education system demanded the active participation of a variety of bureaucratic tools; pedagogical methods; and politically trained personnel within the MEN, its auxiliary institutions, and families throughout the empire. It also called for a revitalized curriculum to enforce the legal and theoretical principles enumerated in the Manifesto of Race and subsequent racial legislation. The curriculum that resulted in the 1938–39 and 1939–40 academic years, however, was composed of lessons remarkably similar to those developed well before the infamous July 14 publication.