Passion and conscience. Federico Chabod Historian of the Nation.

This monograph examines the biography of the historian Federico Chabod through its key moments, focusing in particular on the influence exerted by nationalism and Fascist totalitarianism on the historical narrations of the nation by the leading exponents of historicism, chief among them Benedetto Croce. One of the main threads running through the work concerns the attitudes of Chabod and other leading Italian historians towards the role played by feelings in history, and their influence on the historian himself in his construction of the cognitive processes of the past. The interpretations of these issues arrived at by Chabod and other Italian historians are compared with the thinking of such European historians as Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Georges Lefebvre and Friedrich Meinecke on the same theme. Analysing the influence of great political events – Fascism, Nazism, the Second World War – on these European historians’ modes of thinking about emotions, the essay tries to identify the way in which their differing historical and cultural roots have conditioned the relationship of the various national historiographies – especially the Italian – to today’s history of emotions.