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An analytical interpretation of Mussolini's 1938 racial legislation
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

Print this Article    •    About the Author    •    Bibliography/Sources

This article is a primary source analysis, a line-by-line analysis of Fascist Italy's famous 1938 race-based legislation often called the "Manifesto of the Racial Scientists." There are competing schools of thought as to whether this turn towards racial exclusion owes itself to Hitler's influence or was distinctly Italian. Read one of my dissertations here for a strong argument that Italian racialism and the formation of a so-called "Aryan-Roman" identity evolved under a specifically Italian context. You can read the original legal document here.

The so-called “Manifesto of the Racial/Racist Scientists” was an academic treatise published in the prominent organ Giornale d'Italia in July of 1938 during the height of Italian Fascism. Produced by the collaboration of several ethnic Italian (mostly male) intellectuals, university literati, polemics, and squadrist rabble-rousers, the Manifesto was intended as a verification of the biological, cultural, and natural primacy of race, eugenics, and racial stratification as basic parameters of civilization and imperial competition. The author is responding to the hitherto nascent role of race in Italian politics and the partial doubts among other Italian intellectuals, and encouraging race to become central to the Fascist state. By 1939, the treatise had percolated into state law, equipping Italian Fascist integralism with the juridical vocabulary to forge a racially-stratified, chauvinist empire that placed the Italian race at the top as a beacon of Roman civilization and its Ethiopian, Albanian, Arab, and Slovene subjects as naturally-servile biological inferiors. The fact that it was originally published for a widely-circulated everyday newspaper, and in rather simple or “un-scientific” vernacular indicates that the authors intended to proliferate these racialist concepts to Italian society in general using the collectivist Fascist movement as a vehicle for the supposed national good. It is a salient example of the role of the intelligentsia, modern scientific categorization, biological classification, and racial pseudoscience in corresponding with the modern state to create a raison d'etre for the Neo-Roman Empire of the Fascist worldview. By comparing the historical evolution of Fascist Italy with this primary source, historians can understand the evolution of an integral, exclusionary Italian identity.

Before the source was published and became law, the role of race as a central marker for Italian identity was largely unclear and vapid. Some Italian intellectuals, including an early Mussolini himself, found issues of race to be largely unproductive, precarious, and disunified. Some even encouraged mixing to create a “hybrid vigor,” whilst others were not apt to emphasize racial science since Italians and Mediterranean races were broadly classed as biological inferior among European intellectuals. The small cultural and drastic historical distinctions between northern and southern Italy also tacitly placed the northerners as racially superior and closer to the Germanic civilizing orbit and the southerners closer to that of the barbarian Arab hordes, thereby making it difficult for Mussolini to unite a split population under one racial identity. Nationalists were also hesitant to bring racialist integralism to the center of daily and state behavior, fearing they would be seen as merely importing doctrine from their Hitlerian competitor for Axis empire. The drastic volte face of Mussolini and Italian Fascist intellectuals, as epitomized in the Manifesto of Racial Scientists, came as Italy had solidly arisen from squadrist infighting and famine into a highly-centralized integral state with its tentacles of “higher Roman civilization” ensnaring the effete races of Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, and the “wild tribes” of Albania and Dalmatia. Italy now found itself in a world where the Italians – with their distinct cultural, linguistic, and now racial identity markers – ruling over other distinct races. This “scientific proof” from intellectuals therefore verified and gave a framework of understanding to this new Italian historical experience. By analyzing this primary source, we can trace how Italy (and therefore the integral chauvinist Italian identity) went from a collective Fascist movement that even allowed the membership of Jews and other races into a chauvinist empire of Italians civilizing non-Italians. It was this historical experience that created the new conceptual markers of an Italian ethno-racial identity, an invented Volk for a new imperium.

Analyzing the verbiage of the source offers striking ammunition for a historian studying the evolution of racialism, national fantasy, and identity. We can see how these “scientists” are directly arguing with other literati whom may consider race to be either invented or at least impractical as a method of sociopolitical stratification, insisting that race is not simply an “abstraction of our spirit, but...a reality that is material and perceptible with our senses...[verified under Fin-de-Siecle scientific categories of] physical and psychological characteristics which were inherited and which continue to be inherited.” We can detect the modernist desire to classify and order the world under new taxonomic labels, arguing that race is not a mystical invention of romantic dreamers but a “purely biological concept. It is therefore based on other considerations than the concepts of a people and of a nation...[not simply] historic, linguistic, and religious considerations.” The specific references in the source to the South Slavs (particularly Croats and Slovenes), Arabs, and black Africans intimate that Italian Fascist intellectuals are directly responding to the national interaction with their new imperial subjects. Not only are they described as distinct in terms of culture and social status, but as being entirely unrelated races as alien Semites, tribal Hamites, or primitive Dinaric peoples on the imperial periphery. This worldview was intended to define the Italian identity as being culturally, genetically, linguistically, and historically Roman, distinct in blood and oath from remnants of the “alien” minorities and the subjects of Mussolini's Roman Empire. This source therefore can be clearly used as evidence that the Italian Fascist state, through the influence of modernity's chauvinist intellectuals and race-scientists, intended to forge an integral state that revolved around the newly-cultivated Italian identity and excludes those identities it now saw as alien, and lionized its empire as a beacon of civilization created by a separate Italian racial identity. This is best represented by the authors' arguments that the Italian identity must “have absolute dominance over the other [identities]...”

Most striking is the outlining of the “Aryan” race, a laughable concept widespread among academics at the time. Although derided by most European centers and especially Germans as racially backward and largely uncivilized, the Italian intellectuals have now elevated themselves to semi-divine membership of a holy, culture-creating race with a casus imperia to civilize and build the world. In a salient case of the malleability of race and identity, almost overnight, Italian identity went from a largely passive framework under the liberal Piedmontese monarchy into an exclusive chauvinist empire of racial masters and obeisant subjected races. Even historical memory and history itself are rewritten to justify the right of the state to imperial hegemony, arguing that “the [Aryan] population with its Aryan civilization has lived for several millennia in our peninsula; very little remains of the civilization of the pre-Aryan civilization.” The fanciful implication made is that the radiance of the Romans must have been the work of this primeval genesis-race, and therefore the Italian people as offspring of this holy order have a right to supremacy since their supposed “ancient purity of blood is the greatest title of nobility of the Italian Nation.” This source tells historians a great deal about the intellectual mores and historical consciousness of the Italian integral state of Benito Mussolini. The source is also crucial for understanding the gradual Italian turn towards the legal marginalization of the Jews, whose identity is now universally excoriated strictly because they are “composed of non-European racial elements, absolutely different from the elements from which the Italians have originated.” As this source reveals, biology alone became the sole marker of identity for Italian Fascism. Even if these peripheral Others understood their identity in terms of their abstract nationality, their language, their politics, or their religion, the hegemonic state now dictated the “true” markers of their innate identity for them.

There are a number of heuristic implications from this source that are not answered and would warrant further study. Although the authors insist that these ideologies of race and identity are indigeneous and must not be imported from the more extreme form of their German allies, it is still debated today as to what extent Italian Fascist racialism owes itself to Hitlerian thought. The abstract conceptualizations of “Aryans” was not at all of Nazi origin, nor was racial chauvinism against minority races and Jews on the periphery. It would be instructive to further research the writings, background, and theories of these authors and “scientists,” and to what extent they emerged out of collaboration with German nationalists, National Socialists, and romantics. Joseph Goebbels and Hitler have both been recorded as being irritated that Mussolini was far too passive in his enforcement of Italy's racialist and Antisemitic laws. It would be academically useful to research the reason for his supposedly lax policies, and whether this German criticism implies that such racist laws in Italy were primarily exported from the Third Reich.

For my impending research project on cultivated Fascist identity, this source will obviously be quite applicable. It exemplifies how, when, under what vocabulary, and from whom these invented markers of identity emerged into Italian society. It very clearly answers the historical questions, “how did Fascist Italy understand 'Italianness'? What constituted an Italian identity: race, language, residence, or political affiliation?” My research will use this source as a key example of how Fascist identities progressively shifted from a relatively open Fascist collective that, in general, only emphasized Italian ultranationalism, into an exclusionary consciousness of Roman and Aryan racialist hegemony over imperial subjects. It potentially contradicts the many secondary sources that insist that Italian racism must have only been an import from Berlin, since the source itself insists that these racial doctrines are innate, “Italian,” and must by no means be compared with the Scandinavians and their German kin. It also may support the increasingly common secondary sources that argue that Mussolini and Italian Fascism were long infatuated with racist doctrines but were only gradually able to implement them. The source conspicuously demonstrates the general historiographical and historical themes of modern racialism, integral nationalism, biological or organic empires, and scientific classification of the world into taxonomic stratification. It also tellingly illustrates the malleability of identities and the role of the hegemonic state in framing the characteristic markers of those identities. In the context of Italian history which my project seeks to document, it chillingly exemplifies how a fragmented community of conflicting regional identities that was broadly considered inferior in Europe can, in its own understanding as dictated by the state and its intelligentsia, transform itself into a race of culture-creating bearers of a reborn Roman civilization to the wild forests of Ljubljana and the deserts of Addis Ababba.

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

-The original legal document itself can be found from Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania (http://users.dickinson.edu/~rhyne/232/Nine/RacistScientists.html)