Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini's Italy (Paperback)

A fascinating exploration of the letters that ‘ordinary’ Italians who supported fascism wrote to Mussolini in the 1920s and 1930s This original, revealing and disturbing book provides a grassroots view of fascist Italy Duggan’s superbly researched book uncovers the nasty reality of [Mussolini’s] regime and demonstrates that there was a disturbing symbiotic relationship between fascism and the Catholic Church In his magnificent new book, a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in Fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read, Christopher Duggan fills the gap by examining a wide range of diaries… This enables Duggan to deliver not merely a detailed account of popular attitudes towards the regime, but, far more, a general history of Fascism that for the first time treats it, not as a tyranny that allowed ordinary Italians no possibility of expressing themselves freely, nor as the brutal dictatorship of a capitalist class that reduced the great majority of the country’s citizens to the status of victims, but as a regime rooted strongly in popular aspirations and desires. Magnificent...a pathbreaking study that everyone interested in fascism, or in Italy past and present, should read