De Felice and his teaching. “For a history without prejudices”, by Francesco Perfetti

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: Not far from an important volume dedicated to the figure of Augusto Del Noce, Francesco Perfetti delivers to the reader another work on another great Italian scholar of the twentieth century. This is the historian Renzo De Felice (1929-1996), whose historiographical teaching is still, unfortunately, divisive today. In "Per una storia senza crimini", il realismo storico di Renzo De Felice, published by the Turin publisher Nino Aragno, Perfetti reconstructs the historical-intellectual itinerary of the scholar of fascism, showing all its importance, both in terms of the results achieved and from the point of view of the methodology that would be best to follow when one wants to be a historian. From the preface, however, the current president of the National Historical Council also gives an account of the human side of De Felice. Reserved and hostile to worldliness, Perfetti recalls the first meeting, which took place thanks to Del Noce, from which a long association would then arise. Like many others, De Felice was a Marxist in his youth and also a member of the PCI. An experience that he will reveal to have been highly instructive: "having been a Marxist and a Communist immunized me from moralizing about historical events". Having graduated in Rome with Federico Chabod, De Felice became a scholarship holder at the Italian Institute for Historical Studies founded by Benedetto Croce. It was not so much his liberal acquaintances in Naples, but rather the events of 1956 that definitively distanced him from the communist political religion, whose "renewing character" he had already questioned, as can be seen from a letter sent to one of his teachers, Delio Cantimori. And it was thanks to Cantimori's urging that the scholar born in Rieti - a city that this year, together with the Spirito-De Felice Foundation directed by Andrea Ungari, is awarding a prize in his name - would begin to study, after having dedicated himself to Italian Jacobinism, the figure of Benito Mussolini and the "fascist phenomenon".

For De Felice, making history means trying to understand, and not justify or even prejudicially evaluate the events that have occurred. And this can only be done on the condition of "emancipating history from ideology, of separating the reasons for historical truth from the demands of political reason." De Felice, Perfetti recalls, was accused of a certain sympathy for fascism. A judgment, all things considered, completely false, but which is due to some De Felice theses that are difficult to digest: among these, that fascism was not a monolithic phenomenon, but that it also included a left-wing revolutionary component and in a certain way a component dedicated to the cult of progress, and that between National Socialism and fascism there remained differences, if not outright antitheses, such that if the first could be classified as totalitarian the second could not be so in full title. De Felice was critical of the idea that history could be conducted through moral judgments or pre-judgments: “Moral discourses applied to history, wherever they come from and however motivated, provoke a sense of boredom in me, arouse my suspicion towards those who pronounce them and lead me to think of a lack of clear ideas” . The last intellectual encounter, Perfetti recalls, was with François Furet and in particular with Il passato di un'illusione (1995). Like Furet, De Felice was also the systematic object of controversy. Perhaps because he was a free scholar, perhaps, the historian recalls, “because I am a former communist, and former communists are less easily forgiven”.

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