Seeing Fascist Italy

Abstract

This article examines the reception of Fascist Italy in the French far-right weekly „Je suis partout“ during the 1930s. Drawing on articles, travel accounts, political commentaries, and cultural reports, it analyses how journalists and intellectuals associated with „Je suis partout“ mediated between the Italian and French political contexts. Focusing on travel, reportage, and cultural mediation, it shows how the Italian experience was selectively reconfigured for a French audience and represented as a space of national regeneration, social discipline, and political modernization. The study also examines ideas such as latinité and the construction of a broader Latin political and cultural space in which Fascism could be made intelligible and attractive to sections of the French far right. It then traces the gradual reassessment of the Italian model in the second half of the decade, showing how the Ethiopian War, the Rome-Berlin Axis, and the emergence of competing authoritarian experiences transformed the framework through which Fascist Italy was perceived. The article argues that the reception of Fascism constituted an active site of political production, in which foreign experiences were appropriated and reshaped to serve domestic ideological and political agendas.