Jacopo Pili
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The Italian public's reception of the Fascist discourse on Britain

Chapter 5 puts Fascist public discourse to the test. It draws on the relatively effective methods the regime used to check the pulse of public opinion in order to understand to what degree the representation of Britain during the two decades of the Fascist era had managed to inform Italian people’s opinions. In particular, it challenges the notion – sometimes sustained by historians of Italian public opinion – that the Italian people were generally immune from hatred of the enemy and that their support for the declaration of war in June 1940 was only due to the hope of winning an easy victory, rather than by any real hostility towards the enemy. The chapter also interrogates the degree to which the Italian people retained hostility for the British during the conflict and whether they considered victory feasible after it was clear that the immediate defeat of London was not likely. The chapter suggests a more nuanced view, according to which the Italian people had absorbed many of the anti-British tropes proposed by Fascist public discourse, being consistently hostile towards the British before the defeats suffered in winter 1940–41, and again as the aerial bombing campaign escalated during the last phases of the Fascist war.

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