Laboratoire Italien (Sep 2023)
Ce que art et poésie veulent et ne veulent pas dire chez Mussolini
Abstract
As the most recent historiography on Fascism has amply analysed, art and culture occupied an important place in the Fascist totalitarian project. Mussolini himself had a privileged relationship with writing, whether literary, poetic or journalistic. The aim of this paper is to analyse all the occurrences of ‘arte’ and ‘poesia’ (and their closest derivatives) and the contexts in which they are used throughout Benito Mussolini’s Opera omnia, in order to understand the meaning and political issues that these terms encompassed for him throughout his life and career. What emerges above all from this study is the fact that words such as ‘arte’ and ‘poesia’ are not used solely in the aesthetic sphere: Mussolini also used them to describe both his own politics and those of his opponents. During the socialist period, they were used to describe – and discredit – the discourse of his political opponents, but at the time of the Caporetto turning point, the lexical field of art was used in both a positive and metaphorical sense. On the one hand, Mussolini developed the metaphor of the political artist to define the political leader he intended to be for the Italians; on the other, he enhanced the idea of poetry as action while stripping the word of its literal meaning.
