There are many ways to approach the study of fascism, here's one that combines some economics with the social aspects. And where it gets away from our favorite definition of fascism:
Contrary to popular belief, fascism can be most accurately defined as the political belief that the state is more important than the individual. This belief is what allowed fascists to justify pursuing "racial purification" of humanity. They considered the individual rights of those they killed as less important than the greater good that they fervently believed would come to humanity through the supremacy of a certain race. Essentially, fascism focussed on community, rather than the individual, which is undoubtedly a hallmark of the left wing.
it is not talking about fascism but something else.
From Berfrois:
In November 1933 an extraordinary paperback appeared on the shelves of Italy’s bookstores and newspaper kiosks. Titled The Art of Drinking (L’arte di bere), Umberto Notari’s ‘fictional essay on economics’ addressed the origins of, as well as proposed various solutions to, what many contemporaries considered to be the country’s burgeoning ‘wine crisis’. ‘Men no longer drink’ wine laments the story’s protagonist, the Marquis Olinto Baglia, to a group of his acquaintances. Instead of vino, the twentieth-century man ‘drinks other things’ such as coffee, tea, liquor and various other types of mostly ‘insalubrious’ and ‘foreign’ beverages.1
‘Among our, as well as the preceding, generation’, he continues, wine consumption had dropped by as much as thirty per cent.2 Such staggering losses, Baglia worryingly exclaims, were emblematic of a ‘universal moroseness’ which had gloomily descended over the Italian peninsula between the fin-de-siècle and the years immediately following the First World War.3 Serving as a poignant symbol of ‘national degeneration’, the precipitous loss of wine consumers had only exacerbated the beverage’s blemished public image among middle- and upper-class connoisseurs. Instead of ‘elevating the people to the highness of wine’, the Marquis contends, Italy’s ‘millennial’ beverage had been ‘democratised’ and ‘lowered to the level of commoners’.4 What was urgently required, interjects Primarosa Mathossian – one of the Baglia’s invitees and, in Notari’s eyes, the archetypical fascist woman – was the popularisation of a ‘national taste for wine’.5 ‘No product is closer than wine to the human soul’, she contends – ostensibly convinced by the Marquis’s ceaseless overtures regarding the beverage’s indispensable role within the country’s forthcoming national palingenesis – ‘No product has more power [than wine] to transform man’s spirit’.6
Notari, of course, was not alone in such concerns. Indeed, during fascism’s twenty years in power (1922–45), Italy’s luxury wine growers, merchants and industrialists laboured feverishly to rehabilitate the beverage’s downtrodden public image among the country’s privileged households. Stemming from a combination of decreasing wholesale prices for common wines and increasing hourly wages for industrial labourers during the opening decades of the twentieth century, the popular classes had gradually become, in the anxious words of one contemporary, ‘the great mass of drinkers in Italy’.7 By the early 1920s, therefore, wine, as a general category of beverage, was closely intertwined within the minds of many middle- and upper-class consumers with the country’s popular taverns and saloons, alcoholism and physical and moral degeneration among the labouring masses.
In responding to these challenges, the country’s pro-wine campaigners pursued a variety of ambitious and wide-ranging public relations and collective marketing campaigns, which were intended to re-establish ‘wine’s honour’ and recontextualise the peninsula’s ‘standardised’ or ‘typical’ wines as interwar Italy’s wholesome, family-friendly ‘national beverage’.8
Informally led by the indomitable Arturo Marescalchi, to whom The Art of Drinking was warmly dedicated, the Industrial Wine Lobby (IWL) aggressively underscored wine’s purported ‘alimentary and hygienic virtues’ by harshly distinguishing between ‘genuine’ Italian wines and other categories of alcoholic beverages.9 Partnering with some of Italy’s most outspoken ‘medical celebrities’, the IWL’s pro-wine publicity campaigns were intended to convince the ‘educated classes’ of the myriad benefits of moderate wine consumption.10 In addition to encouraging Italians to substitute their consumption of foreign or ‘exotic’ beverages with the peninsula’s luxury wines, wine lobbyists reached out, specifically, to Italian housewives by promoting the quintessentially Italian ‘art of drinking’.11
Wholly conscious of the influences of women’s preferences within the bourgeois household, the pro-wine lobby sought to promulgate what Marescalchi coined as a ‘wine education’ among middle- and upper-class Italian women.12 In shaping the ‘female palate’, the IWL hoped to transform Italian women into loyal wine consumers themselves and, equally as significant, indirectly influence the tastes and habits of their immediate family members and friends.13
The peninsula’s public spaces of consumption, too, fell under the purview of wine lobbyists’ scrutiny. In 1929 pro-wine campaigners launched the ‘the rebirth of the wine tavern’.14 Filled with bright streams of hygienic daylight, tasteful furniture and stimulating embellishments, fascist Italy’s ‘rehabilitated’ osterie would, wine lobbyists anticipated, reintroduce middle-class and wealthy consumers to the country’s ‘temple’ of wine consumption.15
In the early 1930s Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship launched a wide range of interconnected popular mobilisation campaigns which aimed to stimulate a nationally focused, self-sufficient economy and, more broadly, a widespread feeling of collective belonging among Italians. In the wake of these campaigns, the IWL encouraged Italian sightseers and connoisseurs to ‘get to know [their] country better’ by exploring the peninsula’s bucolic countryside via gastronomic sojourns and ‘oenological itineraries’.16 Culminating with Siena’s Exhibition Market of Typical Italian Wines and the National Wine Truck in 1933 and 1934, respectively, wine lobbyists’ turismo themed collective marketing campaigns visually, as well as spatially, conjoined the consumption of Italy’s luxury wines with Italian national identity.
This article explores the way in which vino came to be viewed as an ‘Italian’ beverage among Italy’s bourgeois and upper-class households during the interwar decades. More broadly, it seeks to illuminate the various ways in which influential agro-industrial organisations co-opted, and in some cases actively shaped, the regime’s ‘reclamation’ and mass mobilisation campaigns by promoting the consumption of their industry’s foodstuffs and beverages as a ‘national duty’.17
During its two decades in power, as historians of fascism have amply demonstrated, Mussolini’s dictatorship sought to reshape Italians’ relationships both with the Italian state and with one another by deploying ‘austere dietary habits’ as ‘potent symbols of political allegiance and national identity’.18 Indeed, by frequently associating consumer ‘duties’ with national ‘duties’, the dictatorship ‘provided the thrust to create an identity and profile which was typical of an “Italian” consumer’.19
While significantly expanding our understanding of the regime’s impacts, or lack thereof, upon Italians’ mentalités and collective practices, however, scholars of fascism have largely overlooked the inconspicuous, but nonetheless influential, roles played by intermediating agents, groups, and organisations within the shaping of the foundations of a distinctly Italian consumer consciousness and identity during the fascist ventennio. In contrast to the Duce‘s presumptuous claim that ‘only the state can give people a sense of self-awareness’, many of interwar Italy’s industrial lobbying organisations, including the IWL, co-opted and manipulated the regime’s campaigns for regenerating Italian bodies and behaviours in accordance with their industries’ largely private commercial objectives.20
By analysing the varying ways in which typical wine growers, merchants and industrialists, in partnership with Mussolini’s dictatorship, sought to rebrand the peninsula’s standardised wines as the country’s ‘millennial’ beverages, therefore, this study intends to illuminate, as well as expand our understanding of, the complex dynamics of political agency and culture-shaping power in fascist Italy.
The ‘Battle’ against the Bottle and the Bettola
During the first two decades of the twentieth century the demographics, as well as meanings, of wine consumption in Italy changed dramatically. Between 1880 and 1910 Italian wine production doubled by a yearly average of more than twenty million hectolitres. As a result of these increases in domestic production, wholesale prices shrank considerably, which delivered affordable common wines (vini comuni) directly into the hands of the country’s popular classes.21 Such circumstances, exclaimed Alessandro Schiavi in the Italian Anti-Alcoholic Federation’s 1909 study Is Alcohol a Danger for Italy? (L’alcoolismo è un pericolo per l’Italia?), amounted to an ‘anarchy of wine growers’, which mandated an immediate, and decisive, intervention by society’s higher orders.22....
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