What is fascism? Who is a fascist? What was it like to live in fascist times? Author Victoria de Grazia addresses these questions in her new book  The Perfect Fascist: A Story of Love, Power, and Morality. It tells the history of Mussolini’s rule from a surprising vantage point,  namely, the marriage of a rising Milanese Black Shirt, one of the Duce’s closest collaborators, to an ambitious New York Jewish opera diva. Moving behind the façade of totalitarian rule, as we explore the fate of this ill-conceived match and reconstruct  the figure of Attilio Teruzzi, the embodiment of fascism’s virile impetuous New Man,  we see the workings of fascist power in a new light, at once more personal and political, sinister and violent.

Victoria de Grazia is Moore Collegiate Professor at Columbia University. She is the author of important works  on consumer society and cultural hegemony, including  Irresistible Empire (2005), The Sex of Things (1996) and the forthcoming Soft-Power Internationalism, 1990-2020 (2021), and has written two previous prize-winning histories of Italian Fascism: The Culture of Consent (1981) and How Fascism Ruled Women, Italy, 1920-1945 (1996). She was a founding member of the Radical History Collective, has won Fulbright, Woodrow Wilson, American Academy in Rome, Guggenheim, and Jean Monnet fellowships,  and is  member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University and the National History Center) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partners (the George Washington University History Department and the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest) for their continued support.