ABSTRACT
Mussolini’s regime’s relationship with the Italian people, always ambiguous, had changed, and this had its effect on the rhetoric which was so much of the Fascist way. Certainly there was no sight whatsoever of any credible alternative to Fascism, and from the outside the system continued to impress. Fascism in Italy was, after a fashion, consolidated by 1940, and a generation had grown up the generation which would fight the war knowing nothing else, hardly able to imagine even what alternative system might be like. Here was a significant difference in experience between Mussolini's nation and that of his Axis partner, Nazi Germany. Relations with very large industrial firms, such as Fiat, come under this heading, but there were many other lesser, often curiously contradictory, examples and among them, as we shall see, was the film industry. Despite the Fascist rhetoric of achieving modernisation, industrialisation, its love of everything technical and potent, fast and futuristic, Italy remained overwhelmingly agrarian nation.
