ABSTRACT
It was during the 1930s that the more drastically negative aspects of Italian fascism at last became evident to more and more people (both in and out of Italy) who had previously been duped by the regime’s flamboyant propaganda. Inevitably influences from Germany began to seep in during the middle years of the decade, winning support from some of the more ruthless of Mussolini’s subordinates even before the Duce was himself firmly committed in that direction. The deplorable Roberto Farinacci (1892–1945) stands out as the most vociferous advocate of a repressive cultural policy on Nazi lines; yet even he had only a limited influence in practice, thanks to the wildly contradictory opinions which continued to co-exist within the fascist hierarchy. 1 Meanwhile the scales fell from countless previously sympathetic eyes when the unabashed imperialist aggression of the Second Ethiopian War (1935–6) gave Mussolini a dangerously inflated sense of power. The grim sequence of events that followed – the adoption of Hitler’s race policies in 1938, the Pact of Steel in 1939, leading on insidiously to Italy’s fateful entry into the Second World War (1940) – is far too familiar to call for comment here.
