Making Fun of the Fascists: Humour against the Leader Cult in Fascist Italy and Vichy France, 1922–1945

Fascist propaganda portrayed Benito Mussolini as the embodiment of the state, invested with the providential role of saving Italy. Vichy propaganda broadcast a similar message. After France’s surrender on June 17th, 1940, Marshal Philippe Pétain proclaimed: “I am giving France the gift of my person to alleviate its misfortune.” Yet discourses celebrating these leaders provoked mockery by the regimes’ opponents. Was humour a genuine form of political resistance? And how effective was it in undermining authoritarian rule?

‘Making Fun of the Fascists’ will tackle these questions from a transnational perspective, by comparing anti-fascist satire in Fascist Italy and Vichy France and by examining the ways in which these authoritarian regimes prosecuted humour as a crime. In both Italy and France, forms of humorous opposition ranged from popular jokes, sanctioned as ‘offesa al Duce’ and ‘outrage au chef de l’État’, to fully fledged satirical publications, such as Alberto Giannini’s Il becco giallo and the French Resistance’s clandestine leaflets and newspapers.

For the satirists, persecution was sometimes difficult to withstand. Fascists repeatedly burned copies of Il becco giallo, vandalizing its editorial offices and damaging Giannini’s home. Condemned to five years of confino, Giannini escaped to France in 1926, and yet there he had a change of heart and switched sides, eventually founding the Fascist satirical paper Il Merlo. The presentation will focus on the consequences of these forms of mockery for both the ridiculers and the ridiculed, the regimes and their opponents, highlighting the strengths and limitations of humour as a tool of resistance against the cult of the leader.

Benedetta Carnaghi is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at Durham University in the UK, where she is researching a project entitled “Making Fun of the Fascists: Humor Against the Leader Cult in Italy, France, and Germany, 1922–1945.” She is also turning her dissertation into a book called Agents of Betrayal: A Comparative History of Fascist and Nazi Spies, 1927-1945. She was previously an Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a visiting lecturer at the John S. Knight Institute at Cornell University. Carnaghi explores the history of totalitarianism from below and has examined the everyday experience of terror under authoritarian regimes in such venues as the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, S:I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, and The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914-1945.