While forms of both spiritual and biological racism had existed in Italy since the nineteenth century and a number of Italian scholars adhered to northern
‘The Racial Inferiority of Anglo-Saxons’ 91 European racial theories, the fact that people like de Gobineau and
Chamber-lain, the fathers of biological racism, held the Italians in contempt alienated most Italian intellectuals.2 Even when, with the development of anthropology, eugenics and archaeology, the European debate about race was dominated by a more ‘scientific’ approach, the strong antiscientific prejudices held by the ide-alistic cultural élites of Italy meant that cultural, or spiritual racism (as well as Lamarckian, or environmental, genetics) was always more popular in the coun-try. Internationally, Italy was weak compared to other European nations, and the great difference in the development of northern and southern Italy inspired many racist Italian thinkers to speculate on racial explanations for these dif-ferences.3 Eventually, in the early twentieth century, two schools emerged: one that identified the Italians with the Aryans and one that claimed they were Mediterraneans. The first assumed that the Italians were part of the dominant ethnic identity of northern Europe, implying that current Italian weakness was the consequence of the country (and of course the southerners in particular) being ‘racially contaminated’ by inferior races. The second insisted that, far from being Aryans, the Italians were part of the (recently ‘discovered’) Mediterra-nean race. The hugely influential anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi was the most important of the Mediterraneanists: he claimed that the Mediterraneans, being an independent group themselves, were the greatest of the races and denied that the Aryans (who, until recently, had been unable to develop civilisation) had a meaningful influence on European history.4 Anti-Germanic and anti-Nordic feelings peaked during the Great War, as reflected in Mussolini’s writings at the time.5 However, his new Fascist comrades also influenced the future Duce’s early racial ideas. While Mussolini praised the Latin race in one of his speeches, he also deplored the current state of Italy, and soon absorbed much of the Na-tionalists’ stance on regenerating Italy. Convinced of the necessity of improving the Italian people by transforming their character along Fascist lines, he made it clear, even before his rise to power, that eugenics must play a role. However, it was not until 1927 that he started to introduce measures aimed at increasing the ‘health’ of the nation, by encouraging physical activity, as well as fecundity, with the creation or improvement of prenatal and maternal support structures, increasing criminal sentences for those involved in abortion and taxing bache-lors.6 The Catholic Church supported these policies,and for ten years Mussolini appeared convinced that such policies were proving successful.7 Increasingly racist towards people of colour, after the proclamation of the Empire in 1936 Mussolini began outlining an apartheid system in East Africa and was incensed by accounts of frequent miscegenation there.8 The development of an Italian
92 chapter 4
Fascist racial doctrine was the consequence of the Duce’s frustration with the apparent failure of his attempts to build a ‘Fascist New Man’ through both po-litical indoctrination and eugenics programs.
German-style racism was quite unpopular in Italy in the mid-1930s and would remain so for most of the population. In 1934, during a period of temporary crisis with the new Nazi regime in Germany, Mussolini openly ridiculed Nordicism and German claims of racial superiority. In 1936, Sergi once again championed the Mediterraneanist cause with a book entitled The Britons: Mediterraneans in the North of Europe, in which he claimed that the glories of the British Empire came from the Mediterranean origins of part of its people.9 In his book, Sergi stated that the Mediterranean presence in the British Isles preceded by far the var-ious other peoples, like the ‘Celts, Scandinavians, Wikings [in English in the text]
and Normans, Danes, Angles, Saxons, pirates and thieves, who brought enor-mous damages to the population and the territory and caused fierce and bloody civil wars as well as a century-long, deep anarchy.’ While they probably were not the first inhabitants, the Mediterranean Britons (linked with the Iberians) still had a major ethnic presence in the islands. The successive invading peoples were indeed little more than ‘a few hundreds of men that suddenly landed on the Brit-ish coasts assaulting and submitting the [native] inhabitants like the fierce pirates they were,’ who were unavoidably assimilated by the indigenous population.10 His conclusion was that ‘it is possible to trace, in the British population, an archaic base common with many other populations of Europe, Greece, Italy, France, Spain with [sic] Portugal, as well as with other populations of Central Europe.’ 11
However, and surprisingly, when Mussolini decided to create his own brand of racism, he did not make use of Italian Mediterraneanism, but did so by syn-thesising the concept of Romanità with the Nordic Aryan myth. Unsatisfied with the progress of his attempt to transform Italians, convinced that the myths of Romanità and Mediterraneanism had proven insufficient for his goals, he thought that Nordic Aryanism could provide Italians with a militaristic racial model. Mussolini’s contempt for southern Italians and his long-time anti-Afri-canism probably made such a choice easier, and in 1938 the Duce privately stated that he himself was Nordic.12 Mussolini tasked the young anthropologist Guido Landra with writing the ‘Manifesto of the Racial Scientists’ in 1938.13 The Mani-festo sported a scientific approach to the problem of race. While Romanità could be kept with reservations, Landra’s Nordicist racism replaced concepts like Lati-nità (Latin-ness) and Mediterranean identity with Nordic-Aryan myths.14 Sup-ported by the anti-Semitic faction of the Catholic Church, the racial campaign singled out Jews, useful targets because the stereotypes surrounding them were close to what Mussolini wanted to fight in the Italian bourgeois class. The racial
‘The Racial Inferiority of Anglo-Saxons’ 93 laws did not, however, signal the final victory of the Nordicist faction. Mussolini
himself seems to have regretted his support for this brand of biological racism and the Mediterraneanists fought back, reclaiming much of their lost influence under the banners of spiritual racism and Catholicism. The struggle did not cease until the end of Fascism and around 1941 a new faction, the one led by spiritual Nordicist Julius Evola, emerged.15 With consensus proving impossible, only German occupation of the country made the pro-German faction, led by the long-time anti-Semite Giovanni Preziosi, the force behind the harshly an-ti-Semitic Fascist policies of the Republic of Saló in 1943–1945.