Meggie Macdonald

To anyone who enjoys reading in detail about sex, power, violence and society, one of the best and most satisfyingly prolific writers you can turn to is the French philosopher (although he did not consider himself one), Michel Foucault.

This man carefully and conscientiously studied history in a variety of ways and then deconstructed each aspect point by point, bringing out the details that many historians and scholars had missed because of assumptions and biases within their discipline that precluded such an approach.

One of Foucault’s most famous works, The History of Sexuality, in 6 books (3 of which he completed before his death in 1984), catalogues the nature of human society’s approach to sexuality throughout the ages and how it has interlocking attributes within structures of power.  However, a short excerpt of another work, The Spectacle of the Scaffold, is what has recently restored my attention to this enigmatic and fascinating writer.

Foucault suggests that the spectacle of a public execution that went out of practice in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was inhuman, ineffective, or simply went out of fashion (depending on who you talk to) has severely limited our perceptions of the visibility and exercise of power.

Throughout history, the purpose of a public execution had multiple layers.  First, it was meant to punish the individual for crimes against ‘the Crown’ (this can also be the State, the Nation, the People, etc – basically any socially binding and recognised force of law).  Second, it was meant to deter others from committing similar crimes and the severity of the punishment was directly proportional to the severity of the crime against the Crown.  Third, it was meant to demonstrate the power of the Crown in society – both in its presence and its action against the criminal.  And fourth, the publicity of the punishment made the audience a player on this stage wherein the power of the Crown, the vitality (and eventual death) of the criminal, and the audience’s power to react were played out.

The intricacies of these events were sometimes neither clear nor conscious, particularly to the participants, but it was a vital element in the nature of society’s approach to crime.  When punishment was taken behind closed doors – into a prison, into a private death chamber – the people as a player in state punishment ceased to exist.  This removal of punishment as a visible manifestation of power has driven underground society’s concepts of punishment, justice, and social cohesion.  Foucault suggested that this turn away from the transparent observation and participation of power has prohibited society from appreciating punishment on a societal level.

Punishment, he argues, is the collective action of society against those who threaten its framework and stability.  If punishment is no longer societal and instead has a personal association, the display of power is no longer that of a latent agreement between the people and the Crown.  It is the ambiguities of this situation that drew my attention, and so I offer you this:  if the people cannot agree that the force of law is just and powerful through the observation of justice and power in action, what does that say about society’s understanding of justice and power in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?  I believe this is the question (one of many) that Foucault himself left hanging for his readers to contemplate themselves.

The Body of Il Duce:  Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy
By Sergio Luzzatto, Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a. Torino, 1998; translated (from the Italian) by Frederika Randall, Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Co LLC, New York, 2005

Sergio Luzzatto, professor of modern history at the University of Milan, has produced a truly excellent book that examines Italy’s very unique experiences during the Second World War.  Unlike Germany today, surviving the guilt of a generation past and renewing faith in their role as a contributing European partner, Italy has been caught between the guilt of allowing Mussolini to act as an ally of Nazi Germany and the frustrations and anxieties of a conquered state despite their contributions to the victory in Europe.  Mr Luzzatto addresses this paradox quite literally through the body of the man who was the focal point of this internal conflict.

From the opening quote describing the massacre of partisans in the Piazza Loreto in 1920, so similar in the emotions harboured in that same place after 1945, Luzzatto draws attention to both the continuity between pre- and post-war Italy and also to the gradual developments leading to the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini and the Fascists.

The layout of the book is quite simple and is composed of seven chapters as follows:

1) Tough to Eradicate
2) The Ox of the Nation
3) An Unquiet Grave
4) Mussolini, Dear Departed
5) The Executioner
6) The Quality of Mercy
7) The Return of the Remains

It begins with the various assassination attempts against Mussolini during his rise to power and his time as the head of state, continuing on to his death and the defacement of his body in 1945, to the theft of his body and subsequently the state’s decision to put it into hiding rather than publicly bury it, to the Italian people’s gradual analysis of their sentiments towards Mussolini and the Fascists and how, over time, they were able to come to terms with their history and bury their guilt and their rage along with the body of Il Duce himself.

As an ancient historian myself, who must be so careful with the primary sources used when analysing historical events, I found Luzzatto’s use of tabloid newspapers and magazines refreshingly new.  His clear understanding of their value was what kept me reading the book, since it was this informal and unedited poll of public opinion that shows how the ripples of war affected Italy long after 1945.  This is something that does not exist on anything approaching the same level of continuous publication from the ancient world.

It is this recognition in no uncertain terms of the complex nature of Italy in the twentieth century that is brought to light so effectively by the author and with such flowing language by the translator.  The text does feel repetitive at times when the author is, for example, drawing attention to all the insults heaped on the body of Il Duce in the press.

However, it is the simple structure that mirrors the progression of acceptance by the Italian people of both their history and their future that is most profound.  Professor Luzzatto has made a profound contribution to the future of Italy by mapping it out, chapter by chapter.

Review of Carthage:  A History by Serge Lancel, translated from the French by Antonia Nevill, Paris, 1992.

Having recently finished reading much of archaeologist Serge Lancel’s book, Carthage:  A History, for my own research, I felt that a review was due for this piece of work based on its scope and its accessibility.

This book consists of an overview of this city as it relates to the socio-political dynamic of the Ancient Mediterranean.  At once an ancient colony that developed its own identity fused with Libyo-Phoenician culture, a commercial maritime power, and a powerful threat to Roman expansionist aims, Lancel presents Carthage as a linchpin or hinge of history it is own right.  The author’s archaeology background figures highly into the structure and layout of this book, beginning with the foundation of the city in the 8th century BCE and the earliest material remains available for study.

His exploration of the city continues with the material evidence that points to a developing international trade of wine and oil, identified using the pottery sherds found in the tophet (roughly a kind of garbage dump, where vast quantities of artefacts have collected over time) and those found throughout the ancient Mediterranean.  Lancel points to the fact that despite Greek being the international language of commerce, it was Carthage who established themselves as a central hub or distribution centre for some of the most sought after items on the market.

Lancel’s ability to sum up the First and Second Punic Wars in less than half a dozen pages without losing the thread of events or the emphasis on their importance is laudable.  In fact, his clarity draws attention to the general importance of the wars with Carthage to the history of the ancient Mediterranean world.  One of the most spectacular pieces of data, something that is nearly always omitted from Roman histories of the Punic Wars, is the fact that, ten years after the treaty of Scipio Africanus, the Carthaginian Senate petitioned Rome to allow them to repay the balance of the war indemnity in full.  Not only that, but shortly thereafter Carthage was regularly ensuring that supplies of grain reached the Roman expeditionary forces.  Lancel is careful to note that, although the Second Punic War was a dire and hard-fought affair, Carthage was able to recover much faster than Rome had anticipated.  No wonder Cato continued to shout ‘Kartago delenda est!’

Serge Lancel excavated the Hannibal Quarter on the Byrsa in Carthage during the 1970s and has subsequently published his team’s findings in two volumes.  Carthage is a sort of historical supplement to that archaeological work and acts as the first of a pair of books about the famous city, the other being Hannibal (Paris, 1995).  The entire text is based largely upon this archaeological work, as well as the earlier work done by Pierre Cintas among others.  As the book moves from the foundation of Carthage into its commercial and maritime exploits, Lancel moves from a solely archaeologically-based analysis of culture and begins to incorporate the Latin and Greek primary source material (Livy and Polybius primarily).

This book is an incredible piece of work, accessible in nearly all respects – a rarity for archaeological texts – and comes ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’, in a manner of speaking.  Serge Lancel, one of the world’s most renowned archaeologists highly decorated in France, produced a useful guide to the intricacies that dogged the development of Carthage and what eventually brought about its downfall at the hands of Rome.  His analyses of the interactions between Carthage and other Mediterranean powers, most particularly Rome, speaks to those gaps in the historical record left by Livy and Polybius that most scholars bemoan as hopelessly lost.  Lancel has shown that literary sources used in conjunction with the archaeological record available can produce a much more rounded scope.  However, it can only be Lancel’s expertise and engaging writing style (effectively transmitted into English by Antonia Nevill) that makes this archaeological work a work of scholarly strength.