Staging Fascism

On an April evening in 1934, on the left bank of the River Arno in Florence before twenty thousand spectators, the mass spectacle 18 BL was presented, involving two thousand amateur actors, an air squadron, one infantry and cavalry brigade, fifty trucks (18 BL was the model number of the first truck to be mass-produced by Fiat), four field and machine gun batteries, ten field-radio stations, and six photoelectric units. However titanic its scale, 18 BL's ambitions were even greater: to institute a revolutionary fascist theater of the future, a modern theater of and for the masses that would end, once and for all, the crisis of the bourgeois theater.
This is the complete story of 18 BL, a direct response to an April 1933 speech by Mussolini, who called for the creation of a distinctively fascist "theater for twenty thousand spectators." The book describes how the spectacle arose amidst the theoretical debates unleashed by Mussolini's speech; how it was able to put itself forward as a solution to anxieties regarding the inadequacy of fascist culture; how and by whom it was organized and realized; and the work's aspirations, achievements, and failures.
The detailed reconstruction of these various aspects of 18 BL serves as a springboard for a larger inquiry into the place of media, technology, and machinery in the fascist imagination, particularly in its links to fascist models of narrative, historiography, spectacle, and subjectivity.

Jeffrey T. Schnapp is Professor of French and Italian and Comparative Literature at Stanford University.