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Giulia Albanese, Paul Corner. Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 457–458, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae555
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In Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator, Paul Corner traces some of the key elements of the Fascist regime and the way it is represented in the national and international public sphere today. This concise volume is the historian’s response to, and an attempt to reflect on, the growing presence of memories of the Italian Fascist experience in Italy (and elsewhere). These are essentially positive and trivializing images of a dictatorship that, after twenty years of violent and disruptive authoritarian rule, led Italy into the political and economic disaster of the Second War World.
Divided into six chapters—devoted respectively to Fascist violence, the relationship between consent and coercion, Fascist welfare, modernization and the modernity of Fascism, Mussolini’s role as a statesman, and the cult of the Duce—the volume moves effectively between the history of the regime and the public memory of it in recent decades. Mussolini in Myth and Memory thus allows us to explore some of the most significant and debated topics in the historiography of Fascism, as well as to recall some of the main events and processes associated with the regime and their place in the country’s public memory.
