luca baldissara

In the first thirty years of Republican Italy’s history, historians were at the same time researchers of the past, teachers of history, but also hommes de lettres. They studied the past but did not disdain political commitment in the present issues. They were intellectuals that reconstructed the events of the recent past and participated in the process of cultural formation of the young people, combining academic diligence with political engagement. Many would have devoted their job of historians to understand what it was, in the history of Italy, which gave rise to war and Fascism. In the postwar period Italian historians elaborated therefore a global reading of the history of their country to explain Fascism and the war. In the general histories of Italy published among the mid-Forties and the mid-Seventies it is particularly evident than the reflection on the past was developed taking into consideration its results. To reread those histories today can contribute to the elaboration of a collective profile of the Italian historians, with special reference to their public role in the long postwar period.  The locution indicates a homogeneous historical phase, characterized by the deep transformation of Italy from rural to industrial and urbanized country, where politics and culture were tightly interwoven. The deep Seventies’ crisis - crisis of the idea of boundless growth, fiscal crisis of the state, crisis of mass political parties, crisis of a model of relationship between politics and culture - will eventually put an end to this historiography and to the specific way to be "intellectual" of the historians.