Italia: primer caso de disciplinamiento juvenil de masas

Abstract

In the first years of the XXth Century, a progressive nationalization of Italian student youth began. These young people were the major base of those responsible for the entry of Italy into the First World War and of the officers who kept up the war mobilisation for three years. At the end of the war, these young people, as well as many adolescent students who had not taken part in the war, set up squads, usually fascist-led, in order to destroy the peasant and worker movement organisations. The fascism that came into power in 1922 made these youths the image of a «regenerated nation», and tried to educate them as an ideal reflection of the regime. It was the first model of young people’s authoritarian disciplining into a «state youth» and it inspired other European dictatorships. But this totalitarian framing did not stand up to test of the Second World War. Within the civil society, in 1943 the younger generations’ mobilisation made the regime’s police control reach crisis point, as they reached out to destroy fascist symbols in an iconoclastic way.