Between Giorgia Meloni and Corrado Augias. Understand Renan to quote him properly

The controversy over Rep. has drawn attention to an author too often reported out of turn. His nation needed not only the famous “everyday plebiscite”, but also a common heritage: a heritage that we are increasingly losing

In recent days a controversy has developed over Republic between Corrado Augias and Prime Minister Meloni brought to attention a little-read but much-quoted author, Ernest Renan. Above all, his conference “What is a nation” of 1882 is referred to: a famous text, but which has little circulated in Italy. It was first published only more than a century later: in 1993 by the publisher Donzelli and then in 2019 by Castelvecchi; a delay in which the taboo towards the entire semantic field of the nation that established itself in Italy after 1945 had a great influence. However, before and after these editions countless have cited Renan’s definition of the nation as an “everyday plebiscite.”. Rightly famous definition, since it effectively summarizes an essential element of the democratic nation: the will of citizens to be together, the continuously renewed willingness to recognize themselves as a national community. In this respect Renan did not say things very different from those repeated throughout his life by Giuseppe Mazzini, also theorist of a “voluntaristic” conception of the nation, who identified an essential principle in the consensus of its components against any idea based instead on the objective element of “race”.