Growing Up Under Fascism

Converting the new generation of Italians into fascists was therefore a fundamental goal of the regime from its earliest years. Of all the ways that fascism attempted to regiment Italian society, the youth organization was undoubtedly the most capillary, articulated, and widespread as well the most successful. This project unfolded in several stages over the course of the two decades and entailed the expansion of membership to different age ranges, the multiplication of forms and fields of intervention, and the complete structuring of young people’s lives under the aegis of the party. Established in 1926, the Opera Nazionale Balilla was an autonomous institution with the task of assisting and educating young men from the age of six to eighteen. After this time, no other youth associations were permitted. The elimination of the Catholic youth organizations was a subject of the negotiations in the signing of the Concordat. According to this agreement, the Catholic action and Catholic university students would refrain from any nonreligious activity and devote themselves solely to the religious assistance of their adherents. In return, the Church strengthened its ecumenical position for youth in the school system as well as in the army. In 1937 Italian Youth of Littorio was established as a totalitarian organization. This change also accentuated the pre-military focus of education by including both Militia and Army officers in the youth leadership roles. Because of chronic unemployment among young people, the fascist youth movement was the only one to provide young people with resources for recreation and support. The fascist policy was particularly paternalistic and authoritarian, freely intermixing persuasive incentives with deterrence and repression. The ONB, in addition to constituting the regime's recruiting base, represented one of the main pillars of the nascent welfare state, both in the services offered (sport, summercamps, school patronages) and in the growing number of state and parastatal personnel who administered them. The chapter hypothesizes that Italian fascism maintained a great consensus among the youth. In a country where living and consumption levels were still extremely low, there was no space or resources for alternative forms of youth union or free leisure. As the regime rapidly forced young Italians into the public sphere, it was above all the organization of leisure time that offered novelty and, in some ways, a means of social leveling in a still predominantly agricultural country marked by class division. The regime implemented also an educational reform very early. It was presented at the time as “the most fascist of reforms” and is remembered in historical memory as “the Gentile reform” from the name of the philosopher Giovanni Gentile who inspired it. The Gentile reform was ultimately more about the triumph of neo-idealist thought over positivism than about the establishment of a specifically fascist idea of education. The explicit intention of the Gentile reform was to drastically reduce the number of high school students to a select group and to move adolescents into the labor market as quickly as possible. This had much in common with the desire to limit access to high schools and universities for the girls. This new situation further restricted university enrollment by young people from the poorer social classes. Since 1924 professors had the legal status of state civil and since 1931 they were required to take an oath to the fascist regime. University students were organized in university groups, GUF. Attentive to literature, cinema, art, theater, and cultural and political debates, these became the training ground for many critical young intellectuals, or for a new generation of faithful fascists.