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Renzo De Felice, the great biographer of Mussolini and the first scholar to write about
Italian Fascism on the basis of archival materials, has long been a favorite target of British historians. Nearly twenty-five years before MacGregor Knox's tirade in the Times Literary Supplement (see MacGregor Knox, "In the Duce's defence, "TLS, February 26, 1999), Denis Mack Smith wrote a similarly impassioned denunciation of De Felice in the same publication. The two attacks are striking similar, even to their titles:"In the Duce's defence" now, "A Monument to the Duce"then. The"substance" of the two critiques is virtually identical, despite the intervening quarter-century: De Felice is said to be overly sympathetic to his subject, incoherent and insufficiently critical on the nature of fascism and its relationship to the Nazi movement and regime, and unfair to the verge of slander on British foreign policy. Knox gratuitously throws in all kinds of other little digs, complaining about the extraordinary length of the tomes, the "uncompromisingly dense type," the "amorphous chapters ... wriggling with digressions, and chronologically unpredictable...." the "profuse footnotes" that "reprint ... verbatim, in type even smaller than that of the main text, the archival curiosities that De Felice and his research team turned up."
One would never know from such carping that De Felice performed a singular service for all those who came after him, a rare act of scholarly honesty and thoroughness. Since he was the first to actually see the documents, he felt obliged to cite big blocks of information, in order to show his readers both the quotations he wanted to use, and the context in which he found them. For Knox to complain about excessive documentation is either perverse or idiotic; would he prefer a simple footnote referring the reader to boxes of documents in the Roman archives? Had De Felice taken that course, he would have been excoriated for providing insufficient documentation, and rightly so, in my opinion. Instead of complaining about the thoroughness of his documentation, Knox should be grateful for the remarkable service De Felice performed for all of us. Had he put De Felice's work in proper context, and treated the Mussolini biography as a great exploration of the subject the way De Felice himself did-as an evolving exploration,...