De Pétrarque À Mussolini: Évolution Du Sentiment Nationaliste Italien by Maurice VaussardReview by: Louis L. SnyderThe American Historical Review, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Oct., 1961), pp. 131-132Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1846305 .

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Jaussard: De Petrarque a Mussolini 131

broke the stranglehold of Baronius and Bellarmine on Italian letters and made pos- sible the cultural renovation of the succeeding decades.

University of Chicago ERIC W. COCHRANE

DE PITRARQUE A MUSSOLINI: EVOLUTION DU SENTIMENT NA- TIONALISTE ITALIEN. By Maurice Vaussard. (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. ig6i. Pp. 303.)

MAURICE Vaussard has had a long and distinguished career as publicist, jour- nalist, and historian. His special interests are nationalism, Italy, and religion, and his work has appeared in leading French journals. He is currently chairman of the sixth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Ltudes on the history of European nationalism.

In this his most recent work Vaussard combines all three of his main interests. Italy, he believes, offers a particularly favorable ground for the study of national- ism. The scene of a major ancient civilization, Italy was for many centuries de- prived of unity and independence. As other countries, it was infected with the germs of nationalism that emerged in the French Revolution.

ITe author traces the sentiments, ideas, and practical steps in the development of Italian nationalism. He divides his book into three major sections. Part I is con- cerned with background: the idea of Italian primacy in literature before I815 (Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Alfieri); the beginnings of the risorgimento, when Mazzini and Gioberti elaborated the idea of Italian primacy; reactions to the Gio- bertian thesis from Balbo to Cavour; the ideological influence of the poet Cardtucci; and the political imperialism of Francesco Crispi.

In Part II Vaussard tells how the national idea took hold of the Italian con- science, while noting such ideological precursors as Oriani, D'Annunzio, and Corradini, and the practical aspects of Italian imperialism and irredentism from i9oo on. In Part III the author treats imperialism in action during the Fascist regime, with chapters showing how Mussolini became an imperialist, the period of ascending Fascist imperialism from 1925 to 1936, and the decline and fall of Mussolini from I937 to 1943.

The outline is familiar enough, but the book's special value lies in Vaussard's skillful blending of ideology and action. He is at his best in revealing how great works of literature as well as the little reviews contributed equally in forging the myths that nourished economic realities, political and military events, sentiments of fantasy, and humiliations. Quite rightly, he makes no real distinction between nationalism and imperialism, but shows how one sentiment merges imperceptibly into the other. Tragic, indeed, is the story of how Italian cultural aspirations were perverted into the integral nationalism epitomized in Mussolini's fanaticism. As Carlton J. H. Hayes has pointed out, nationalism can be either a blessing or a curse.

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132 Reviews of Books

Excellently organized, factually accurate, carefully documnented, gracefully and charmingly written, Vaussard's book is a valuable addition to the bibliography of nationalism.

City College of New York Louis L. SNYDER

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD. Edited by Allan Nevins and Howard M. Ehrmann. GERMANY: A MODERN HISTORY, by Marshall Dill, Jr. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. I96I. Pp. X, 467, xxiii. $8.75.)

The University of Michigan History of the Modern World was projected more than a decade ago, and the series is now well on its way to completion. In this volume, the latest in the series, Professor Dill has tried hard to conform to the pattern and purpose of the series. The whole span of German history is treated, but the treatment becomes progressively more detailed. Three-fourths of the book is devoted to the last century and more than half to the period since I9i4. In this sense, it is a history of "Modern Germany."

Brief and compact as is the treatment of the period up to the time of Bismarck, Dill manages to give the reader some sort of a comprehensive and integrated glimpse of most of the important movements and personalities in German life. The leading musicians and philosophers as well as the leading politicians and warriors appear in the narrative. If all the complexities of Germany history do not emerge, the reader, nevertheless, gets some notion of the conflicting problems and forces that characterize the German past.

The treatment of the period since the time of Bismarck is much more detailed. Here the author shifts from a straight chronological organization to a modified chronological-topical scheme, and his grasp of events seems to be deeper and firmer. If he offers the reader little that has not already appeared in well-known books in English, his synthesis is basically sound and unbiased. As he moves to- ward the present, and the history of Germany merges more and more into the history of Europe and the world, he struggles manfully to disentangle German his- tory from the history of Europe and the world and to keep the story moving and easily intelligible.

Taken as a whole this is a good one-volume history of Germany. It is com- paratively free of factual errors, and the interpretation is cautious and well bal- anced. The writing is clear, concise, and even forceful at times, though perhaps the author makes excessive use of passive constructions. Since the book was not intended for experts, most of what one thinks of as scholarly apparatus is lacking. There is an index, but no footnotes, and the bibliography is limited to works in English, most of these being of a general nature. The average educated reader, for whom the book was designed, will find it a readable, competent, interpretive sum- mary of the main facts and developments in German history.

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