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License Agreement on scientific materials use.
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The search for a secular religion to achieve the nationalization of the masses in early 20th-century Italy
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Elena Nikolaevna Yakutina
Moscow University for the Humanities
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Submitted:
May 19, 2025
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Abstract.
The aim of this research is to identify the specific characteristics of the process of societal fascization through the creation of a state religion in Italy. The article examines the Fascist state’s search for a secular religion in order to nationalize the masses, a process that was accompanied by the mythologization of the concepts of “Fatherland” and “Duce”. The monopolization of patriotic rituals is investigated against the backdrop of the prohibition of any other type of party liturgy that contradicts the Fascist regime. The scientific novelty of the research consists of analyzing Fascist communications in the process of creating a religious structure during the “black twenty years” in Italy. As a result of the research, it has been established that the “rituals” of the twenty years of Fascism in Italy, which seem almost elevated to a kind of “political religion”, and the myth of the Duce gained strength in the nationalist movement, in a project that definitively abandoned everything liberal and humane in the "religion of the homeland" of the Risorgimento. The idea of a “political religion” absolutized the cult of the homeland as a “living deity”.
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Key words and phrases:
история Италии
итальянский фашизм
фашистские коммуникации
консенсус
Italian history
Italian Fascism
Fascist communications
consensus
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