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Franco Cardini

Italian historian

Franco Cardini (born in 1940) was an Italian historian and essayist, specialising in the study of the Middle Ages.

Quotes

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  • As if it were Trento in the first decade of the 20th century, just before the war that was to “return” it (!) to Italy, it may seem strange and paradoxical, but I – a Florentine and Tuscan by birth, I believe, from the middle Valdarno area for several generations (people who came from Signa, perhaps as far away as Pescia in Valdinievole) – know this quite well. I know a few things about this city of about thirty thousand inhabitants, which even for those in the region must have seemed like a semi-metropolis, if only because it looked like a city and not a large village. And to some extent, in addition to the beautiful and severe memories of its prince-bishops who had embellished it over the centuries and the Habsburg imprint that had been strong since 1777, when the prerogatives of temporal power had passed to Empress Maria Theresa, was the strong garrison of the imperial army, with 3,000 soldiers who alone made up 10% of the population. Between the Italian population and the Austro-Germans (officers and civil servants, above all, as well as a few innkeepers and tailors who served the garrison), there was a relationship of correct neighbourliness, but also of mutual segregation. It was not that they hated each other, but rather that they ignored each other.
  • From “'Un socialista in Trentino”' (A Socialist in Trentino); in Benito Mussolini, “'Il Trentino visto da un socialista”' (Trentino as seen by a socialist), La Finestra, Trento, 2003, p. III.
  • How can we talk about the system born of the Enlightenment as the best of all possible worlds, when we all know that communism and Nazism are also children of the Enlightenment? We can even say that they are degenerate children, fine: but when we have historical evidence showing us that there are no optimal systems, from what perspective can we continue down this path?
  • It is dignity that forms the basis of authentic and non-abstract equality: a possible and concrete equality, since absolute and perfect equality does not exist and, if it did, it would be horrible.
  • It is true that there was already a divide between the north and the south, but it is no less true that the unification of Italy was paradoxically achieved by accentuating this divide. The real industrial take-off of the north took place with money and labour from the south, and this gap has actually widened. The fight against brigandage was something horrible. The royal army, the royal carabinieri and the royal bersaglieri behaved like a colonial army. These things need to be said and taught in schools.
  • From “L'Italia è un Paese?” [Is Italy a country?], episode broadcast on TV7 on 5 December 2008.
  • (About Costanzo Preve) [...] a philosopher of profound, rigorous and severe training, is, on the other hand, a citizen who knows well that civic courage, far from being a virtue, is simply a duty; and that study can never be an alibi for hiding in well-tended inner gardens while, around us, iron and fire are unleashed.
  • From the preface to the book “'Verità e relativismo”' (Truth and Relativism) by Costanzo Preve, Alpina, Turin, 2006.
  • The truly historical character – also and perhaps even above all from the point of view of civil, social and ethical history: “national identity”, as we would say today – of Camporesi's reading of Artusi is particularly highlighted and, so to speak, summarised in the famous statement by Camporesi that “”'Science in the Kitchen'“ did more for national unification than ”'I Promessi Sposi . Artusi's tastes, in fact, succeeded in creating a code of national identification where Manzoni's stylistic and phonetic features failed.
  • From the Preface to Il libro dei vagabondi. Lo "Speculum cerretanorum" di Teseo Pini, "Il vagabondo" di Rafaele Frianoro e altri testi di "furfanteria", edited by Piero Camporesi, pp. XXIV-XXV, Garzanti, Milan, 2007. ISBN 978-88-11-59719-3.
  • The Great Conspiracy, we can be (almost) certain, does not exist; there is no Table (neither round nor of any other geometric shape) around which Unknown Superiors sit. But there are plenty of plans and programmes formulated to serve the particular interests of lobbies and corporations by individuals and groups who count outside and above internal and international legality, however much the mass media try to prevent their existence and activities from becoming known. [...] In other words, one might ask what is the relationship between the actual power held and exercised today by the government of the United States of America and the process of globalisation. But in these terms, the question is poorly posed. The real and fundamental question is another: what are the real forces that support, partly control and partly directly constitute the government of the United States of America? Whose sovereign power does it represent, whose sovereign will does it execute, beyond the legal forms designed to legitimise it? Does it hold “imperial” power? Or is there, behind it, as behind other forces currently “present” in the world, an “invisible empire” that is in fact irresponsible – in the etymological sense of the term: that is, it is not accountable, it does not have to answer for its actions because no one is in a position to call it to account – before its subjects, who do not even know (or, at least, not clearly) that they are such?
  • From “Astrea e i Titani. Le lobbies americane alla conquista del mondo” [2003], pp. 137-158, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 2005.
  • The new Koranic spring, which we are witnessing in recent years, is a blessing for the world: also, and above all, for the other two Abrahamic faiths. Western modernity has caused a spread of agnosticism and atheism, which has undermined faith in God, but it has not eradicated forms of paganism, which have in fact resurfaced [...]. Believers in the God of Abraham throughout the world cannot but welcome the Muslim renaissance – beyond the political phenomena that accompany it but remain only ambiguously connected to it – as a revival of faith that was unthinkable only a few decades ago. [...] the faithful cannot but look with hope and confidence to every place where Almighty God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is worshipped and prayed to, and where the covenant He made with Abraham, to which He has remained faithful, is strengthened day by day. The God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad.
  • From the foreword to “Il Corano” [The Qur'an], edited by Hamza Roberto Piccardo, revised and checked for doctrinal accuracy by the Union of Islamic Communities and Organisations in Italy, preface by Franco Cardini, introduction by Pino Blasone, Newton & Compton, Rome, 2015, pp. 15-16. ISBN 978-88-541-2834-7.
  • In the festival [...] the arcane becomes everyday, the mystery becomes visible. Who said there is no longer any place for myth?
From “'Il simbolo del Centro del Mondo”', “'Il Tempo”', 22 December 1980.
  • We have no scientific reason to argue that one system is better than another, unless we rely on historical determinism or the law of the jungle, whereby the winner is right because he wins.
  • When the idea of national unity was chosen in the nineteenth century, the identity of the peninsula, which had always been polycentric, was not respected. Naples never referred to Italy, but to the Mediterranean and Europe. The Neapolitans called themselves “regnicoli” (subjects of the kingdom), never Italians, and they were not.
  • I know that mine, here and in this context, is a difficult task. Catholic, traditionalist, a man of order and with a strong sense of state, I could perhaps still call myself “right-wing”. For years I have not considered myself or described myself in this way, but I see that people continue to label me as such. I confess that this annoys me a little, but I let it go. But my commitment to social justice and my staunch Europeanism prevent me from feeling the slightest sympathy for a right wing that has now almost unanimously chosen the most unbridled liberalism and Atlanticism and that often flaunts a hypocritical, instrumental pro-Catholicism, revealing that they consider the Catholic Church to be nothing more than a bulwark of the established order (their “order”) and conformist right-thinking.
  • [...] there are things in the media that can be spoken ill of with impunity: the Middle Ages is one of them. And this is done in order to speak ill of Christianity, which everyone feels entitled to spit on.
  • Since 1965, I have not joined any political parties, although I feel a strong regret at not being able to identify with any of those available to me on the European scene. For many years now, I have simply defined myself as Catholic, pro-European and socialist. :*Introduction to “'Neofascismo e neoantifascismo”', La Vela, Viareggio, 2018.

Tolkien di destra? Era conservatore ma assolutamente contrario al nazismo

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From an interview of Alberto Crespi, L'Unità, 14 July 1999
  • He was a great philologist and had edited the critical edition of Beowulf. In short, he was a remarkable scholar who suddenly wrote a novel: a path made famous in Italy by Umberto Eco, but well rooted in the Romantic and nineteenth-century tradition.
  • Tolkien was a member of the Oxford Christians, a Catholic and a conservative. He was part of that rural solidarity movement, linked to the neighbourhood and traditions, which has been important in English politics since the time of Coleridge. The “Shire” in the book is an idealised England, which is ultimately destroyed by rampant industrialisation. Moreover, Tolkien was anything but simple politically: he was conservative, yes, but anti-totalitarian. Letters to Father Christmas is in fact a book against Hitler. If this seems obvious, it is worth remembering that in 1930s England, many Catholics of South African origin - like Tolkien - were pro-Hitler. He, on the other hand, understood very well the demonic, Faustian aspect of Nazism.
  • The paradoxical thing is that Tolkien, now a mass phenomenon, was a niche writer: he wrote by hand and did the illustrations for his books himself. Above all, he wrote not only for himself, but also for his colleagues and students at Oxford, for people trained to recognise all the references and quotations. In short, he wrote for an elite, and it is worth bearing this in mind when reading him today.

Giovanna d'Arco. La vergine guerriera

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Franco Cardini, Giovanna d'Arco. La vergine guerriera, Mondadori, Milano, 1998. ISBN 8804432551
  • I owe my love for the Middle Ages first and foremost to Joan of Arc.
  • Why Joan? Why this girl in the 15th century, clad in iron and burned at the stake by order of the Inquisition, then rehabilitated by a subsequent ruling, then canonised [...], later becoming an emblem first of traditionalist Catholics, then of anti-clerical populists, then of the right, then of the left, then of patriotic gatherings, then of feminist movements? Does it make sense to revive, at the turn of the second and third millennia, this young woman born on the borders of France and elevated to a central symbol of the French nation [...]? (p. 3)
  • My Joan is that of a boy who loved parish cinemas and those in the suburbs – the only ones he could afford – between the 1940s and 1950s. For this reason, she will forever have the face of Ingrid Bergman, discovered shortly after 1952 in Fleming's Technicolour blockbuster – admired, moreover, in a cut-up third version – and then seen again, in a completely different interpretation and with a very different intensity, in Roberto Rossellini's 1954 film, which, through the text of Paul Claudel, reinterpreted the allegories of medieval sacred representations. (p. 4)
  • But, between Fleming and Rossellini, I had discovered France [...] during a school trip in 1953 [...]. And that young woman, gilded in gold, high on the great horse of the monument in Place des Pyramides, fascinated me; just as I was moved by the images taken almost entirely from Ingres's swift painting and replicated in a thousand ways [...] in all the churches of France. (p. 4)
  • The Maid of Orléans [...] continues to jealously guard her maidenhood, the intimate and profound core of her vocation. I am left with a deep doubt that I have not understood her: but running after her, retracing old written pages and old paths between the Vosges and Normandy, has perhaps helped me to rediscover a part of myself that I thought was lost or vanished. For this too I must be grateful to her. (p. 6)
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