Dei doveri che il pubblico ufficio mi impone: burocrazie statali e ceti di governo nel Veneto dal fascismo al dopoguerra

Starting from a considerable bulk of unpublished archive material – first of all, documents from the Ministry of Internal Affairs – the author reconstructs the bureaucratic machinery in an Italian province, that of Padua, through the investigation in the network of relations which connected the local government officials and offices to the local society and the central power from the second half of the 1930s up to the fall of Fascism. The author has followed all the “local political situations” (as far as this has been possible) through the examination of prefecture documents, in particular notifications against – or in favour of – government or party officials, town clerks and podestà, members of the directorate and secretaries of the Fascist Party, carabinieri and men of the militia, medical doctors, advocates and priests in all the 105 municipal districts of the Padua province. Such documents keep recorded every conflict – but also every common interest – among the authorities involved and they underline the subtle power plots and the different control techniques. Thanks to a wider and wider collection of documented cases – corresponding to a recent and, we believe, scrupulous bibliography – the research brings out the tissue of an entirely controlled bureaucratic society, which was at the same time continually looking for adjustment and compatibility; at the end of the 1930s, the controllers were the first to be controlled, as if they had been the gears of the same system that they were called to superintend. The research on a local level has proceeded thanks to an uninterrupted comparison with a wider regional and national reality; such a comparison has been helpful to understand the articulation of the Badoglio government – which lasted 45 days – and of the first months of the social, Italian republic. Both these forms of government have been examined through the biographies and the memoirs of the officials and the geographic movements of the prefects. They gave their results in the first post-war months and now they can also be studied thanks to the existing documents about the purge - which has been here analysed more on an executive and disciplinary level than on a penal one. Such political choices influenced the way of running the government, as the crusade of the 18th of April and the assassination of Togliatti later revealed. On the whole, this work aims not only at pointing out the State continuity – in a sense, this kind of historiography is here submitted to critical scrutiny and therefore a different fragmentation in periods is proposed - but also at estimating how a form of government can survive and how its bureaucratic network can be renewed in periods of crisis.