... as the text demystifies Tasca’s seemingly bizarre trajectory from revolutionary Socialist to Communist to supporter of the Vichy regime. The book demonstrates how Tasca, an indefatigable cultural operator and Socialist militant, tried all his life to maintain his commitment to scientific analysis in the face...

...This book is a biography of Angelo Tasca, an enigmatic figure in Italian politics during the twentieth century, and an account of his trajectory from revolutionary Socialist to Communist to supporter of the Vichy regime under France. The son of a working-class family from southern Piedmont, Tasca...

... of a fascist seizure of power. Tasca decided to stay in France and collaborate with the Vichy regime. Until 1940, he was uncompromising in his fight against fascism, insisting that war, not appeasement, was the way to oppose Adolf Hitler. Following the French defeat in World War II, however, Tasca had...

...On the night of September 3, 1944, Angelo Tasca was arrested by French soldiers and sent to the military prison in Clermont-Ferrand. While in jail, Tasca changed his public persona to distance himself from the Vichy regime under Marshal Philippe Pétain. His alternative assessment of the situation...

...Angelo Tasca tried to mitigate all the negative impressions that had been generated by his support for the Vichy regime. His life in the 1940s had erased the two decades that he had spent fighting fascism. In 1929, he had accepted the loss of his communist identity in the name of antifascism...