Ordinary exemplars: cultivating the everyday in the birthplace of fascism

Heywood, Paolo

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which ‘ordinariness’ can come to be exemplified as a virtue. It does so by comparing the status of ordinariness in historical and present-day Predappio, the village in which Mussolini was born and is buried. It describes the ways in which Predappio was mobilised by the fascist regime as an exemplar of an ordinary Italian village, rendered extraordinary by its wholesale reconstruction as a jewel in the crown of fascist urban planning. In similar fashion, Mussolini’s ordinary rural upbringing was mobilised in the service of propagandising his extraordinary and exemplary leadership. In contemporary Predappio, by contrast, ordinariness is what locals reach for to contest understandings of their home as irrevocably associated with the extraordinary Fascist heritage they have inherited. One of the ways in which they do so is to celebrate a local exemplar of this ordinariness, Giuseppe Ferlini, the village’s first post-war mayor. In contrast to Mussolini, Ferlini’s ordinariness is not a backdrop to future greatness, but exactly the quality for which he is celebrated. I suggest that these cases demonstrate the need for vigilance in analytic usage of the category of ‘the ordinary’, which often tacitly assumes the existence of ‘the ordinary’ as a scale in itself, independent of human action. I argue instead that ‘the ordinary’ may be the object of ethical labour, rather than its site, and that exemplification may be a form of such labour, in both our accounts and the lives of those we study.

Citation

Heywood, P. (2022). Ordinary exemplars: cultivating the everyday in the birthplace of fascism. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 64(1), 91-121. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417521000402

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 12, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Dec 27, 2021
• Publication Date: 2022-01
• Deposit Date: May 27, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: May 27, 2021
• Journal: Comparative Studies in Society and History
• Print ISSN: 0010-4175
• Electronic ISSN: 1475-2999
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 64
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 91-121
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0010417521000402
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1247500