The end of the anti-fascist paradigm in Republican Italy

Abstract

The focus of this essay is on the cultural debate on 20th Italian history that unfolded at the beginning of the Nineties as a consequence of the crisis of the Republican political system. Two issues were at stake. The first concerned the position that intellectuals had held during post-war years on Fascism, Communism and Democracy. The second concentrated on the contribution that Antifascist Resistance had given to the re-foundation of Italian national identity. Even though a revisionist narrative took place either in the academic environment or in the mass media, one can say that Antifascism continued to play an important institutional role. What really changed was that during the Berlusconi’s era Italian politics got involved in a deep cultural conflict between memory and consensus, that is to say those elements which normally are intertwined within a modern representative democracy.