«Perché l’intelletto abbia respiro e la giustizia abbia il suo corso». La testimonianza civile di Giuseppe Antonio Borgese

Abstract

In January 1935, the anti-fascist periodical “Giustizia e Libertà” published the two letters addressed by Borgese to Mussolini, on 18 August 1933 and 18 October 1934, in which the intellectual, who had already moved to America in 1931, expresses his dissent from the autocratic drift of the regime in Italy. The epistolary discourse, motivated by the desire to express the refusal to impose the Fascist oath on intellectuals and strategically ignored by Mussolini, arrives, in the second letter of 1934, at the definitive break with Fascism, which is opposed to the “free union of the states of Europe”, a civic design cultivated over time with increasing planning determination. We will dwell on the testimonial value of these letters and on the ways in which the intertextual dialogue with the contemporary American diaries intersects, integrates and enriches their private and public depth. In fact, such a cross-reading confers on the “story” of an individual parable the collective breath that it will have in Golia. March of Fascism and in the Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution its inventive and utopian evolution.