Fascist Afterlives: Thoughts on Dictators, Dead Bodies, and Bodies Politic

The journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH) dedicated an entire issue to the exemplarity (positive and negative) of fascist leaders, a quality that lives on, variously contested and defended, long after these leaders die. Their dead bodies become bodies politic; their graves become battlefields. Fascist big men, outsized figures in life, remain so in death, and their legacies are very much alive across Europe. Three contributors to CSSH 64/1 tell us more about this vexed dynamic, giving special attention to the afterlives of the Fascist Trinity: Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco