Abstract
Stuart J. Hilwig, Italy and 1968: Youthful Unrest and Democratic Culture, Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2009; 178 pp., 13 illus.; 9780230575684, £55.00 (hbk)
This engaging and well-researched work aims to fill a gap in the scholarship of the 1968 student rebellion in Italy. Noting that almost all works on the subject have been written from the viewpoint of the students, often by former activists themselves, Hilwig examines how those outside the student movement reacted. By looking at institutions outside the student milieu, the author discovers some interesting material. It is hardly surprising that the Roman Catholic Church, the police and the government were opposed to student demands for university reform and were more than a little scandalized by Maoists waving little red books. But by using government statistics and oral interviews with police, judges and others, Hilwig makes a convincing case that virtually no one considered the student radicals a serious problem. They were seen as more of a nuisance than credible contenders for power.
Oral history as a methodology might be questioned on the basis of changing memories or shifting perceptions, but Hilwig balances these accounts by hard statistics from 1968. A very telling point is that the Italian police regularly assigned more officers to soccer matches than they did to student protests (65). In fact, it can be reasonably argued that most of the talk of a student-led revolution was the work of the press, which spread fear of a Maoist, or ‘left fascist’ insurrection (86–7). One way of viewing Italy in 1968 is therefore as a case study of conscious media manipulation in a country where 74 per cent of all the press was under either corporate or clerical ownership (85). One day newspapers like the corporate-owned La Stampa would sow fears of a rising red fascism with photos of students wielding clubs. The next day they would dismiss students as mere clowns and ‘papa’s boys’ (106). Student rebels were thus either crazy Maoists or buffoons born of wealthy parents. The press ignored or downplayed student actions that could be viewed as reasonable by the public, while highlighting cases of bizarre behaviour. The author shows that there were marches of thousands of well-behaved, conventionally dressed students, but the press published photos only of the most outlandish, or threatening, non-representative sub-groups.
The only major newspaper which was sympathetic to student demands for reform and took them seriously was the Italian Communist Party’s l’Unità. However, its circulation was but a fraction of that of the mainstream media, and even in the PCI many remained sceptical of students they viewed as ‘bourgeois’. This distrust of students’ privileged backgrounds was mirrored among the workers with whom many student activists hoped to connect. While admiring the spirit of the student rebels and their willingness to fight, workers, with limited exceptions, remained alienated. The students came from a different world and spoke a language workers often found patronizing. As Hilwig shows, despite dedicated efforts to link up with Fiat workers in Turin, the relationship between those who studied and those who worked remained problematic (71–4).
Throughout 1968, the government proved unable or unwilling to implement the university reforms that were at the heart of student unrest. Traditionalists, represented largely in the parliament by the Christian Democrats, wanted little, if any, reform. Socialist MPs supported moderate reforms, while calls for drastic change from the PCI were simply ignored. The result was a standoff, resulting in no reform whatsoever.
What is most fascinating about this work is the way it cuts through the myths about 1968 to reveal the truth about student demands. Only small minorities of students were true Maoists, and even these saw Mao as much as a fashion statement as a theoretical guide. Courts saw even extreme protest leaders as little more than misguided members of the elite and accordingly seldom handed out harsh sentences. Police were more shocked by the sexual immorality they perceived than by students’ revolutionary potential. The mainstream media welcomed the protests as a way of selling newspapers. The Church found the protestors’ behaviour more scandalous than threatening. The Communists, although conflicted, were mainly supportive but powerless – and the general public was more amused than threatened. This is a welcome addition to the literature on the student movements of the 1960s that deserves to be widely read by historians interested in the topic.