Capitalism in Decay

(This takes four minutes to read.)

With reunification in the 1860s the bourgeois state proceeded to standarize the Italian language and impose it where it had previously been rare. For example, the predominant languages in Aosta Valley had long been French and to a less extent Arpitan, but in the 1880s the state introduced Italian in tribunal and other official documents and Italian grew in further influence with the introduction of railways and industrialisation in general, slowly turning Italian into the common language among Aosta’s lower classes.

However, the Fascist state of the 1920s began an aggressive campaign to eliminate all ‘foreign’ languages and dialects in national territory despite the objections of thousands. In 1923 the bourgeois state declared the suppression of certain schools and prohibited education of students in any language other than Italian. The state forcibly converted dozens of French toponyms into Italian ones.

Even languages closely related to Italian (often called ‘dialects’), such as Emilian, Friulan, Ladin, Lombard, Ligurian, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Romagnolo, Sardinian, Sicilian, Venetian and elsewhat, were all suppressed. The one notable exception to this homogenization was the promotion of Latin, which witnessed a new age of poetry, literature, journalism, inscriptions, prose competitions, and vocabulary, frequently with Fascist themes, as a result both of state and extrastate actors.

Sardinian culture in particular had only continued to decline in the 1860s and later, but the process of forced Italianization had only intensified during Fascism; the bourgeois state repressed local cultural expressions, including Sardinian mask festivals and improvised poetry competitions, and a large number of Sardinian surnames were forcibly ‘Italianized’.

After an argument between the Sardinian poet Antioco Casula and the fascist journalist Gino Anchisi, who claimed that ‘once the region is moribund or dead, so will the dialect [sic]’, the Fascists managed to prohibit Sardinian from the printing press as well. Antioco Casula tied the significance of Sardinian to the practices of cultural resistance of an indigenous ethnic group, whose linguistic repertoire had to be introduced in school to regain a lost dignity.

Another famed poet from Sardinia, Salvatore (Bore) Poddighe, fell into a severe depression and took his own life a few years after Cagliari’s police commissioner seized his masterwork (Sa Mundana Cummedia). When the bourgeois state officially prohibited the use of Sardinian in schools as part of its 1934 national educational plan against the alloglot ‘dialects’, the then Sardinian-speaking children were confronted with another means of communication that was supposed to be their own from then onwards too.

Overall, this period in Sardinian history was the most aggressive cultural assimilation effort by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, which led to an even further sociolinguistic degradation of Sardinian. A minor exception to the repression was the Sardinian Anthem of the once Piedmontese Kingdom: being a royal tradition granted it immunity to prohibition.

The suppression of non-Italic languages was no better. After Austro-Hungary’s dissolution in the late 1910s, the Kingdom of Italy also annexed Austrian Littoral and proceeded to shut down hundreds of Slavic organizations, including cultural, educational, sporting, youth, social, professional, literary, political, journalist, co-operative, and financial ones, and specifically so with the Law on Associations in 1925, the Law on Public Demonstrations in 1926, and the Law on Public Order in the same year.

Since April 13, 1920, the Fascists instigated riots against Triestine Slovenes, said to be retaliations for the assault that a Croatian population perpetrated against Italian troops occupying its territory in Split. Fascists destroyed numerous Slovene-owned shops and other buildings, culminating in one particular arson, directed by Francesco Giunta, against the Narodni dom or community hall for Triestine Slovenes. Benito Mussolini praised this action as a ‘masterpiece of the Triestine fascism’, and in September 1920 he said:

When dealing with such a race as Slavic — inferior and barbaric — we must not pursue the carrot, but the stick policy. We should not be afraid of new victims. The Italian border should run across the Brenner Pass, Monte Nevoso and the Dinaric Alps. I would say we can easily sacrifice 500,000 barbaric Slavs for 50,000 Italians.

This reflected a common Fascist opinion against the Croatian and Slovene minorities in the Julian March. After March 1923, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie officially prohibited these languages in administration, and after October 1925 in law courts as well. In 1923, in the context of the school reform prepared by the anticommunist Giovanni Gentile, teaching in languages other than Italian was disallowed (although the Istro-Rumanian language in Šušnjevica was a minor exception). Some five hundred Slovene teachers, nearly half of all the Slovene teachers in the Littoral region, were moved by the Fascists to the interior of Italy, while Italian teachers were sent to teach Slovene children Italian.

You undoubtedly noticed that this topic was less straightforward than usual, consisting of my own research rather than lengthy quotes from a book or thesis. Well, that is because English-speaking authors do not have a lot to say about this particular feature from Fascist history. The best that I could find was this brief observation by Katie Galioto:

Similarly, minority languages were banned, gradually at first — as to not offend Italy’s powerful neighbors — and completely by the second decade of Italian Fascism (Tosi 7).

In regions bordering other states, the government made an effort to stamp out German, Croatian, and Slovene from schools and public offices. People were forced to change their last names and replace them with something more Italian — in some cases, people had to adjust inscriptions on tombstones.

However, as happened with the dialect, this push was met with resistance. In some areas, citizens opened secret private schools. Others simply refused to learn more Italian than was required to get by (Ruzza 174).

As you can see, this description is exceedingly basic: there is no sense of scale concerning the consequences of Fascist Italy’s monolingual policy, and hardly any exploration of how far-reaching it was. Someday someone is going to publish a book or thesis in English concerning the Fascists’ monolingual enforcement, but for now this is the best that I can offer.