Abstract EN:

This work attempts to examine a specific historiographic tradition -that of an Italy which has had to assess the role of fascism since 1943. Our aim is to use specific documents to revisit the problems involved in writing about historical events when it is a question of reconstructing the recent past. We will seek to understand how the scientific approach (which claims to capture a rather precise and "true" account of events in the broader sense of the term) must free itself from contemporary stakes or from the collective memory, which are both a catalyst and an impediment. This leads to putting in sharp relief the existence in Italy of an intellectual model whose strength and age remind one of a frail national figure with a missionary calling (Italy as a beacon for Mankind). In the first part of this paper, we will define the general conditions of contemporary historical writing in Italy, in other words, the role of historians as intellectuals. Thus, we will examine Benedetto Croce's influence, certain aspects of the cultural policy of the Italian Communist Party, and the ranks of the more or less militant liberal-democrat intelligentsia, unique to Italy. The second part is an analysis of a few historiographic debates, giving priority to those involving fascism, antifascism, and indirectly communism that emerged during the mid-seventies around the work of Renzo De Felice, when the historian cut into the sound convictions of the established and new Radical Lefts, and at last in the 1990's implicated the concept of a nation state. This seems to have heralded the disintegration of an ideological configuration, at its height in the period immediately after the war, which kept together antifascism, communism and idea of nation and supplied the Italian Republic with a wobbly base.