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- Books<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
27 November, 2017<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/files_u28_Iris_Origo_1936.jpg\" "\\"Feature")
<\/p>\nThe sub-title \u201cAn Italian War Diary 1939-40\u201d explains the title, though, since the diary stops when Italy entered the war, the chill is one of apprehension. Iris Origo, best known for the war memoir War in Val d\u2019Orcia<\/em> (published in 1947) and The Last Attachment, the story of Byron\u2019s love affair with Teresa Guiccioli, was Anglo-American (American father and English mother), brought up in Italy and married to Antonio, a nobleman. Both were rich and together they had bought and restored a derelict estate, La Foce, in the south of Tuscany.<\/p>\n
1939 was Year XVII of the Fascist era. Iris and Antonio are perhaps best described as sceptics rather than dissidents, disliking much about Fascism but accepting it as a reality. Antonio, as the president of a landowners\u2019 association, perforce collaborated with the regime. In 1930 Iris had thought Mussolini \u201ca very great man\u201d, as many in England, among them Churchill and Hilaire Belloc, did then. Some of their friends were anti-Fascists, but Iris was in no doubt in 1939 that most Italians still trusted Il Duce. In particular they trusted that he would keep Italy out of the war. In May, Iris wrote: \u201cTo the best of my belief, Mussolini does not want war. He has never wanted a real war only, at home, the \u2018heroic\u2019 state of mind which its imminence produces . . . and abroad, the achievement of his expansionist aims\u201d, which he believed he could achieve without it. Her judgment was probably right. Mussolini would declare was on Britain (always England in the text) and France only when he was sure Hitler had already won.<\/p>\n
Certainly very few Italians wanted war. A country neighbour tells Iris that \u201call his peasants are terrified\u201d. (\u201cLike ours,\u201d she adds.) One young woman, who is expecting her first baby, prays daily that it will be a girl. \u201cWhat\u2019s the use of having boys if they\u2019ll take them away from me and kill them?\u201d This is extraordinary, when you think how Italian mothers cherish and spoil their sons \u2014 nothing too good for the boys of the family.<\/p>\n
She hears Mussolini speak to a reunion of the first Fascists, the squadristi<\/em>. It\u2019s a cold wet March day, but \u201cthere is another chill in the air: the universal distaste for Germany as an ally\u201d. Others confirm her impression. A young officer, recently back from Abyssinia, tells her that \u201cthe army is intensely anti-German, the King anti-war.\u201d The army would back the King if there should be \u201ca division of opinion between him and Mussolini\u201d. (It would do this in 1943 when the King dismissed Mussolini.) When people speak scornfully of the poor performance of Italian troops in the Desert War, they should reflect that they were not only very poorly equipped but fighting in a war they didn\u2019t want, with an ally they mostly detested.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, Fascist propaganda directed against the \u201chave nations\u201d \u2014 England and France \u2014 the plutocrats \u201cwho were permanently blocking the way of the \u2018have-nots\u2019 to economic expansion\u201d, and denying Italy its rights in the Mediterranean \u2014 \u201cMare Nostrum\u201d \u2014 was effective. \u201cFascists are thus enabled to see the impending war as a struggle between the poor man and the rich \u2014 a genuine revolutionary movement.\u201d One should never underestimate the motivating power of self-pity in fomenting nationalist feeling and in international affairs.<\/p>\n
When Britain and France declared war on Germany in September, a half-English friend says, \u201cNothing, no propaganda, will ever persuade the Italian peasant and workman that it was Chamberlain who wanted war. They\u2019ll know it was Hitler\u2019s fault.\u201d Her son agrees: \u201cThe more time elapses, the more difficult it will be to persuade us to fight on the German side.\u201d \u201cBut,\u201d Iris remarks, \u201cI am not quite so sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
She was all too well aware of the lying propaganda spewed out by the newspapers and the effect of Mussolini\u2019s speeches broadcast to crowds ordered to assemble in piazzas all over the country. People remained ready to believe the slogan Mussolini ha sempre ragione <\/em>(Mussolini is always right). After one such speech \u201cpeople looked more cheerful\u201d and she wrote of Mussolini\u2019s \u201cimmense personal ascendancy\u201d.<\/p>\n
Some of the propaganda was risible. Just before coffee disappeared from the market \u2014 no coffee in Italy? It\u2019s barely credible \u2014 newspaper articles declared that it was bad for the health. An unnamed man told Iris that \u201cthe radio has made fools of us all\u201d. She thought that \u201cthe ultimate result of unceasing propaganda has been to cancel out the effect of all news alike.\u201d Meanwhile, Italians were assured: \u201cIt is now known and proved that the Fascist regime uses one method alone: always to tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Iris Origo was well-connected and better informed than most. Her godfather, William Philipps, was the American ambassador. He told her that the Russian charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires was \u201cby far the ablest and best-informed of all his colleagues\u201d. She had other friends in the diplomatic corps and in the Roman \u201cblack nobility\u201d \u2014 those who had refused to recognise the Fascist State until the Concordat with the Vatican in 1929. Some of these friends were now members of the Fascist Party, \u201cbut they are Catholics first. Whenever there is a clash between the two, Catholicism wins.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Norway campaign and the Battle of France leave Anglophiles depressed and bitterly critical of England. \u201cWill England never arrive in time and save a small country before talking about it?\u201d Liberals see England as \u201ca weak traitor\u201d. \u201cFor years,\u201d one says, \u201cwe\u2019ve all looked up to her as the defender of international justice. And now she\u2019s not had the strength to uphold it.\u201d For such people it\u2019s like a marriage gone wrong.<\/p>\n
Moving between the family estate, Florence and Rome, meeting and listening to a wide variety of people, Iris Origo presents us with a fascinating record of shifts in mood and opinion. No doubt it is partial, as all such diaries must be, and of course her position was a privileged one, but she talks to peasants as well as priests and princes, to her hairdresser and to people met by chance on trains, to foreign visitors \u2014 two young Polish refugees and anti-Nazi Bavarian Catholic cousins. She offers a remarkably wide spectrum of sentiment and opinion, and I find her diary as persuasively reliable as it is unquestionably fascinating.<\/p>\n
There are lighter moments, too long to quote here. One is her godfather\u2019s account of a visit he makes to the King in his fishing-lodge in Piedmont; it\u2019s sad and sympathetic, oddly charming. Another is her report of a strange, even uncanny, encounter in the Vatican.<\/p>\n
When, finally, just before Iris Origo gives birth to a daughter (having written nothing about her pregnancy), the family and their tenants and dependents crowd round the radio to hear Mussolini announce that Italy has declared war. Antonio says, \u201cSalute al re! Salute al Duce!<\/em>\u201d. \u201cThe men salute automatically, without enthusiasm. Then they shuffle away in silence.\u201d Antonio, having done his public duty, says, \u201cCi siamo<\/em>\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s it then \u2014 \u201cI\u2019m going out to look at the wheat.\u201d Il faut cultiver notre jardin.<\/em><\/p>\n
Months previously a simple riddle circulated: \u201cMussolini? Hitler? Chamberlain? Daladier? Chi Vincera?<\/em>\u201d The third letter of each word gives the answer.<\/p>\n
This diary is so good that I wish Iris Origo had continued to keep it going throughout the war. If you love Italy, read it \u2014 and then return to War in Val d\u2019Orcia. <\/em><\/p>\n
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<\/h3>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/books-metternich.jpg\"\/)
Rethinking Metternich<\/a>
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\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/standpointmag.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/windrush-1.jpg\"\/)
Wafted by goodwill onto the rocks of error<\/a>
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\n![\"Default](\"http:\/\/standpoint.thewebsitespace.com\/wp-content\/themes\/tws\/images\/thumbnail-default.jpg\"\/)
Pastoral passage<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
<\/h3>\n
\nRethinking Metternich<\/a>
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\nWafted by goodwill onto the rocks of error<\/a>
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\nPastoral passage<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Iris Origo’s diary of the runup to Italy entering WW2 is a fascinating record which cuts through Fascist propaganda<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}