Towards a Latin Europe

Towards a Latin Europe Review of: Vers une Europe Latine: Acteurs et enjeux des echanges culturels entre la France et l'Italie fasciste, Catherine Fraixe and Christophe Poupault, eds., Brussels: P.I.E. Lang, 2014, 330 pp., euro42.80, ISBN-10: 2875740474 ISBN-13: 978- 2875740472In the years between the wars, Republican France and Fascist Italy vied for international regard as the foremost 'Latin' nation. The fourteen essays in this book examine a network of people whose activities were characterized by the various declensions of a few key terms: Latinite/Latinita, Romanite/Romanita, and Mediterraneanisme/Mediterraneita - concepts that combined a European transnationalism with enhanced nationalism.In their opening essays, Catherine Fraixe and Christophe Poupault, the volume editors, examine the ebb and flow of these concepts back to the nineteenth century. In 1831, the French historian Jules Michelet proposed a union - as much cultural as political - of people of Latin language, or pan-Latinism, as a counterpart to the emerging theories of pan-Slavism. In the 1870s, Latinite found a new voice among the champions of regionalism when Frederic Mistral penned his Ode to the Latin Race (1878) to promote Occitan, the original Provencal dialect; soon thereafter, the Latin fraternity was injected with a new dose of nationalism by Charles Maurras in defence of a Union Latine. In the wake of World War I, France and Italy portrayed themselves as 'Latin sisters', common heirs to the classical tradition who had stood together against a 'barbaric' German foe. This union was sealed during the years of the 'call to order' that followed the Allies' victory over Germany, at a time when modernist and anti-modernist artists alike made pilgrimages to view the Old Masters in the Louvre and in Italian museums. Latinite then receded as France witnessed with some trepidation the rapid rise and violent military takeover of Italy by the Fascists in the early 1920s, engendering reciprocal mistrust and tension between the two nations. Soon enough, Latinite returned to service as a bulwark against the rearmament of Germany and an antidote to the spectre of National Socialism after 1933. The temporary rapprochement between Italy and France culminated in 1935 with the Treaty of Rome signed by Benito Mussolini and French foreign affairs minister Pierre Laval. Just months later, however, France broke off diplomatic relations with Italy in response to the latter's invasion of Ethiopia and the declaration of Empire. While the victory of the French Socialist Popular Front in June 1936 distanced the two nations even further, relations between the two were not totally severed until June 10,1940, when Italy, siding with Germany, declared war to France.There is a difficulty, however, in reviewing the various arguments developed by the authors in this book, which is that the people who evoked Latinite held very different views of what it meant. One thing is clear, however, and that is that, throughout these turbulent years, the idea of Latinite imbricated culture with politics. Most interesting, then, is the way this book buttresses an argument made a few years back by two French art historians, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn and Eric Michaud: that the not-so-subliminal way in which Latinite and its proxy terms fuelled a North/South dichotomy was predicated on a mythic notion of two types of thought. This notion was far from new to art history, whose foundation as an autonomous discipline in the early nineteenth century took place in a Europe that was profoundly divided politically and increasingly entrenched by the consolidation of nation-states. Art history was thus eager to establish stable, if spurious, concepts of national character.The essays included in this book function on two levels. As different as their political regimes might have been, France and Italy were nations where culture was first and foremost an affair of State. For those French diplomats and cultural officials on the Right who mistrusted the messiness of the democratic parliamentary system and were haunted by a fear of their nation's cultural decadence and its alleged subjugation to the North, 'Latin' fascism became a beacon. …

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