Fascist Italy

Fascist Italy is the setting for the novel’s memories of dictatorship, resistance, and the transition to postwar rule. It first appears in Jacopo Belbo’s account of childhood during the final years of the regime: his uncle Carlo serves the state, while the tenant farmer Adeline Canepa opposes Fascism. Later, Belbo and Casaubon place these memories against the political conflicts of their own time, and the novel’s conspiracy-making turns real historical documents and anti-Semitic fabrications into materials for a fictitious Plan.

Dictatorship in Everyday Life

Between 1943 and 1945, Belbo is an eleven-year-old evacuee staying with his uncle Carlo and aunt Caterina in a Piedmontese town. Carlo is a decorated veteran and head of the local tax office. His public position and sense of duty align him with the Fascist government, while his relationship with Canepa, the tenant who cultivates Carlo’s inherited property, embodies the local class conflict beneath that political alignment. Their interests are opposed: Canepa regards himself as exploited by the landowner, while Carlo believes the land yields him too little.

Their political antagonism is sustained in ordinary encounters. Canepa, an ardent anti-Fascist, tries to curry favor with Carlo by offering eggs through Aunt Caterina, but Carlo refuses to be bribed and insists on collecting what he considers due. Canepa answers with rumors against his landlord. Though the two men live under the same roof, they stop greeting one another; Carlo continues to pass Canepa in the garden each evening, ceremoniously greeting Canepa’s wife while ignoring him. Belbo’s memory makes political division tangible not only as ideology or public violence, but as a repeated domestic routine.

Carlo’s loyalties are tested as the regime changes. When Mussolini is removed in 1943, Carlo continues to run the tax office under the Badoglio government. After September 8, when the area comes under the Fascist Social Republic, he adapts again and collects taxes for that government. Belbo does not claim to know whether his uncle suffered over Mussolini’s fall; he remembers instead a public servant who continued his work as authority changed hands. The episode leaves open the difference between personal conviction and institutional continuity.

Resistance and Belbo’s Childhood

Canepa boasts of links to the partisan groups forming in the hills, while the children hear stories about them without yet knowing who they are. The partisans become a visible force when they descend into town without uniforms, wearing blue kerchiefs and firing into the air. Residents shut themselves indoors. Although Caterina assumes that Canepa’s claimed friendship with them will protect Carlo, an armed squad enters the tax office and arrests him. Belbo’s childhood account thus moves from neighborhood hostility to the direct consequences of the shifting conflict.

The period also shapes Belbo’s later reflection on his own relation to courage and political action. At a demonstration against Fascist conspiracies in Milan, he attends but remains at the edge of the march rather than joining a group. The city’s political divisions are described through tacit territorial limits: protesters operate beyond Largo Augusto, while Fascists hold Piazza San Babila and nearby streets. Police watch the unpermitted march, and incidents arise when those boundaries are crossed. Belbo compares the arrangement to a simulated revolution governed by rules, an image that makes the visible confrontation seem both real and contained.

Casaubon later interprets Belbo’s presence at the demonstration as another instance of running away. Belbo’s own reasoning is more divided: he says the conflict belonged to another generation, but wonders whether he stayed away to avoid a test of courage. He asks whether a person can be a coward because the occasion for courage seems trivial, and whether a manufactured opportunity can substitute for the decisive moment that history did not offer. The demonstration therefore joins Belbo’s wartime memories to his adult self-reproach without resolving whether his restraint was prudence or evasion.

Memory, Clarity, and Historical Meaning

Belbo calls the memories of his childhood in the town sweet and, in his account, the only real ones he remembers. Casaubon understands this as a contrast with the later period of deception and interpretive excess surrounding the Diabolicals. In childhood, the political sides seemed distinct, marked by red and black; a bullet and a corpse appeared to have an unambiguous meaning. The remembered clarity is not presented as proof that the period itself was simple. Casaubon notes that Belbo had also been a spectator, watching other people make history, and wonders whether he experienced a moment of choice that he had not previously recounted.

The novel places that longing for clear distinctions beside a later conspiratorial method that makes every historical detail confirm a hidden design. Casaubon’s discovery of Tomar, a real castle associated with the Knights of Christ, prompts him to reread the supposed Provins message and to imagine a centuries-long Templar Plan. Yet he recognizes the crucial reversal: the task is not to uncover the Templars’ secret but to construct it. The contrast with Belbo’s childhood memory is sharp. The past that once seemed to offer visible sides and definite consequences becomes raw material for a story whose coherence is manufactured by its interpreters.

Fabricated Histories and Their Political Uses

The novel traces the supposed ancestry of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion through successive acts of rewriting and political use. In the characters’ account, the text is attributed to the Paulicians, and its twenty-four declarations combine contradictory proposals: suppressing press freedom while encouraging libertinism, condemning liberalism while advocating revolution and social confusion, and pursuing control through war, arms, and inequality. Its conspiratorial portrait draws on anti-Semitic stereotypes, including the claim that Jews manipulate societies for power.

The account also supplies a source history that undermines the document’s claim to authenticity. The Times of London identifies Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers between Montesquieu and Machiavelli as a source for the Protocols; Joly’s pamphlet had attacked Napoleon III, and its arguments were later recast as a supposed Jewish plot. The fictional explanation then adds another layer: the characters claim that Joly himself copied an earlier document attributed to Sue. Rather than offering a reliable historical account, their chain of attribution demonstrates how they turn resemblance, borrowing, and missing links into signs of a single hidden author.

The novel further imagines how anti-Semitic political actors could exploit that process. It recounts that Rachkovsky, a Russian secret-police officer, found a pamphlet based on Joly’s or Sue’s text during a search of Elie de Cyon’s villa. In the characters’ reconstruction, Rachkovsky replaces Witte’s name with Jews and circulates the altered text; Juliana Glinka then passes it through Russian official channels until it reaches the tsar. This account presents fabrication not as a neutral literary game but as a means of political accusation, with anti-Semitic claims used to discredit opponents and threaten Jewish communities.

That danger reaches its starkest and most disturbing expression when a character forces the Holocaust into the Plan’s logic. He interprets the meticulous procedures of Nazi persecution as a search for a hidden message and claims that Hitler sought a point where underground telluric currents converged. This is not evidence about the Holocaust; it is an example of conspiracy thinking absorbing atrocity into an invented explanatory system. By showing the Plan’s adherents make mass murder serve their pattern, the novel exposes how the desire for total explanation can erase historical reality and turn victims into props for a fabricated secret.