2008
Cairn
Gilles Pécout, « Was Modern Italy Born, and Did It Grow, Against the Will of the Italians? », Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, ID : 10670/1.21fdeb...
Beginning with Piero Craveri’s thinking on the relations between State and nation in contemporary Italy, this article suggests a critical reading of the parable of the mismatch between the 'real' and ‘legal’ country. First, the main stages of the difficult meeting between the State and the society since Unity: the free-market period marked by the primacy of a clientelist oligarchy, the Giolittian ‘moment’ of the successful meeting between an efficient administration and a society considered in its realities, the fascist illusion of a reconciliation between State and society and the successive failures of the Republic. The discussion takes up the general interpretation of this mismatch, and then its precise historical arrangements through the birth of contemporary Italy as the basis of a critical examination of current political life. Isn’t it legitimate to go back over the heritage of free-market Italy and that of all the radical and subversive subcultures in the politization of the Italians to go beyond the correspondence between antipolitical and anti-Risorgimento?