Renzo De Felice

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Renzo De Felice, photograph from 1975

Renzo De Felice (born April 8, 1929 in Rieti ; † May 25, 1996 in Rome ) was an Italian historian and was one of the most important researchers of fascism in Italy. He wrote a multi-volume Mussolini biography. In 1995 he was awarded the Antonio Feltrinelli Prize .

Life

De Felice studied at the University of Rome . As a student he was a member of the Italian Communist Party . In the course of the suppression of the Hungarian popular uprising by the Soviet Union, which supported the Italian Communist Party, he signed Manifesto dei 101 in 1956 and resigned from the party.

In 1968 De Felice became a full professor for Storia contemporanea at the University of Salerno . Three years later he moved to the University of Rome, where he initially held a professorship for the history of political parties in the Faculty of Literature; In 1979 he moved to the Faculty of Political Science until he finally became Professor of Storia contemporanea at the same university in 1986 .

In 1970 he founded the magazine Storia contemporanea , which he edited and in which he played a major role until the end of his life; On May 25, 1996, the anniversary of De Felice's death, an obituary appeared in the last issue of the magazine, stating that with the death of its founder and publisher, the magazine could no longer exist.

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De Felice believed that one had to understand the reality of fascism before judging it. Critics have seen an apologetic tendency in this approach . De Felice emphasizes that, in contrast to traditional “reaction”, fascism brought about the active participation of the masses in politics. He interprets fascism as a revolutionary movement of the middle class whose roots go back to the Enlightenment . According to De Felice, fascism did not emerge as a fear of a proletarian revolution, but as an attempt by the rising middle class to define the role.

De Felice did not emphasize the similarities, but the differences between fascism and National Socialism . For him, fascism was outside the "scorching cone of the Holocaust". De Felice rejects any parallelization with simultaneous European movements. There was no European fascism, as Ernst Nolte saw it. Fascism is nothing more than Mussolini's political line. De Felice divided Mussolini's rule into a good period of the early years and the negative years of the later regime. The years from 1929 to 1936, in which the Duce was able to consolidate his power, he called the "years of consensus" ( anni del consenso ). The years of consent of the silent or acclaiming majority until the bad days of the war cannot, according to De Felice, be seen only as the result of manipulation and coercion. De Felice emphasizes the peaceful, pro-Western orientation of Italian foreign policy up to 1934. He does not see the later involvement of Italy in wars as inevitably lying in the logic of the regime.

Fonts (selection)

  • Mussolini.
    • Il rivoluzionario 1883-1920. Einaudi, Turin 1965.
    • Il fascista.
      • La conquista del potere 1921-1925. Turin 1966.
      • L'organizzazione dello Stato fascista 1925-1929. Turin 1968.
    • Il duce.
      • Gli anni del consenso 1929-1936. Turin 1974.
      • Lo Stato totalitario 1936-1940. Turin 1981.
    • L'alleato.
      • L'Italia in Guerra 1940-1943.
        • Dalla guerra “breve” alla guerra lunga. Turin 1990.
        • Crisi e agonia del regime. Turin 1990.
      • La guerra civile 1943-1945. Turin 1997.
  • The interpretations of fascism. Edited by Josef Schröder, Muster-Schmidt, Göttingen 1980. ( Scientific review )
  • Fascism. An interview by Michael A. Leeden. With an afterword by Jens Petersen . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1977 (Italian original: Intervista sul fascismo , published by Michael A. Ledeen, Laterza, Rome / Bari 1975).
  • Observations on Mussolini's Foreign Policy. In: Saeculum. Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte , Volume 24 (1973), pp. 314–327.
  • Mussolini's motives for returning to politics and taking over the leadership of the RSI (September 1943). In: Rudolf Lill (Ed.): Germany - Italy, 1943–1945. Aspects of a division (= series of the Villa Vigoni. Vol. 3). Niemeyer, Tübingen 1992, ISBN 3-484-67003-7 , pp. 38-51.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Giuseppe Angelo (ed.): Renzo De Felice. Bibliografia 1953-2002 . Edizioni del Paguro, Salerno 2002, p. 21.
  2. ^ Giuseppe Angelo (ed.): Renzo De Felice. Bibliografia 1953-2002 . Edizioni del Paguro, Salerno 2002, p. 22 f.
  3. ^ Giuseppe Angelo (ed.): Renzo De Felice. Bibliografia 1953-2002 . Edizioni del Paguro, Salerno 2002, pp. 23-25.
  4. ↑ So z. B. Wolfgang Schieder : Fascism as a past. Dispute between historians in Italy and Germany. In: Walter H. Pehle (Ed.): The historical place of National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main 1990, pp. 136–154, here pp. 139 ff.
  5. ↑ Renzo De Felice in an interview in Corriere della Sera (December 27, 1987). Quoted from Wolfgang Schieder: The birth of fascism out of the crisis of modernity. In: Christoph Dipper (Ed.): Germany and Italy 1860–1960 . Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2nd edition, p. 162.
  6. ↑ On this above all Ernst Nolte: Fascism in its epoch. Action francaise - Italian fascism - National Socialism . Piper, Munich 1963.
  7. ^ François Bondy: What is Fascism? In Italy, a historian has unleashed a political argument with a little book. In: Die Zeit (September 5, 1975).
personal data
SURNAME De Felice, Renzo
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian historian
DATE OF BIRTH April 8, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Rieti
DATE OF DEATH May 25, 1996
Place of death Rome