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Il mio diario di guerra (1915-1917) by Mussolini Benito , edited by Mario Isnenghi , Bologna: Il Mulino , 2016, pp. 225, [euro]18, ISBN 978-88-15-26050-5
From September 1915 to February 1917 Benito Mussolini fought in the war as a member of a rifle regiment. A simple soldier, he was at the same time the well-known director of the interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, and formerly of the national newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party Avanti!. He kept a journal of his war experience, which was serialized in Il Popolo d'Italia. Both as a public and a private document - given Mussolini's role in Italian politics of that time - the journal provides us, in Isnenghi's words, with the rhetoric of a palingenesis that is both personal and collective. Given its public dimension, and also because of its later publication during the Regime, some historians have dismissed the journal as an example of Il Duce's 'transformism'. However, in his thoroughly documented introduction, Isnenghi argues that had the author not become Italy's dictator, this text would have nonetheless attracted the interest of historians as the wartime testimony of both a simple soldier, and an interventionist primary school teacher who was closer to the working class than to the intellectual bourgeoisie. It is also a telling document of the path that led Italy to war and overwhelmed the working classes in the political context of 1914-15. For Mussolini the concept of class had become meaningless, as officers and soldiers allegedly perceived each other like brothers in a war that was made by 'peoples and not by armies' (19 September 1915, 64). In this...